
Class. 
Book. 



Publications of the Department of Modern Indian History, 
Allahabad University. 

No. i. 



FOUR LECTURES ON THE HANDLING 
OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 



Publications of the Department of Modern Indian History 
k Allahabad University. 

No. i. 



FOUR LECTURES ON 

THE HANDLING OF 
HISTORICAL MATERIAL 



BY 

L. F. RUSHBROOK WILLIAMS 

B.A., B.LiTT., F.R.Hist.S., M.R.A.S., etc. 

FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE ; PROFESSOR OF MODERN INDIAN HISTORY 
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ALLAHABAD 



PUBLISHED FOR THE UNIVERSITY 

BY 

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 

FOURTH AVENUE & 30th STREET, NEW YORK 

BOMBAY, CALCUTTA AND MADRAS 

1917 

{All rights reserved) 












»■-* 



TO 

TTN Y COED 

AND THE DWELLEBS THEBEIN 
AUGUST, 1915 



FOREWORD 

The following Lectures are published in accordance with a 
condition of the tenure of the Chair of Modern Indian 
History in Allahabad University. They were written for 
audiences consisting partly of Indian students, and partly of 
the general public. The first three Lectures were intended to 
give such audiences some insight into the methods of modern 
historical investigation. The fourth Lecture is an attempt 
to apply to the solution of a particular problem the theory 
underlying these methods. 

I have to thank my friend Mr. E,. S. Bajpai, B.A., B.C.L., 
Oxon., for his kindness in revising the proof-sheets. 



All Souls College, 

St. Bartholomeiv's Day, 1915. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

INTRODUCTION 1 

LECTURE I : 9 

OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 

1. Classification of Evidence 9 

(i) Non-documentary 9 

(a) Epigraphy 10 

(b) Numismatics 10 

(c) Archaeology 11 

(ii) Documentary 12 

(a) Formal Official 13 

1. Treaties 13 

2. Charters 13 

3. Grants 13 

4. Rolls 13 

5. Writs 14 

(b) Informal Official 14 

1. Correspondence 14 

2. Reports 14 

3. Announcements 14 

(c) Formal Non-official ....... 14 

1. Legal Records 14 

2. Financial Records 14 

(d) Informal Non-official 14 

1. Chronicles 14 

2. Memoirs 15 

3. Letters 15 

2. Official Documents 16 

(a) Formal— General Characteristics .... 16 

1. The Treaty 18 

2. The Charter 18 

3. The Grant 19 

4. The Roll 20 

5. The Writ 21 

(b) Informal 21 

1. Correspondence 22 

2. Reports 23 

3. Announcements 26 



x CONTENTS 

PAGE 

LECTURE II 31 

NON-OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 

1. Formal Non-official Documents 31 

General Characteristics 31 

(a) The Will 31 

(b) The Bond 33 

(c) Accounts 83 

2. Informal Non-official Documents 35 

(a) The Chronicle 35 

(6) The Memoir 45 

(i) Travellers' Narratives 45 

(ii) Autobiographies 47 

(iii) Reminiscences 48 

LECTURE III 53 

PITFALLS IN THE PATH OF THE HISTORIAN 

1. The Historian Himself 54 

(a) Ancient and Modern Conceptions of his Function 

— the Dangers attending the Modern employ- 
ment of the Theoretical Element . . . 56 

(b) Difficulty of preserving the Impartial Attitude 

of Mind 58 

(c) Difficulty of separating the Provinces of 

Theory and Fact GO 

2. The Marshalling of his Evidence 63 

(a) Difficulty of obtaining adequate Quantity of 

Evidence 63 

(6) Difficulty of weighing Evidence when obtained 64 

3. The presentation of his Conclusions ...... 66 

(a) Discrimination of Essential and Non-essential 

Elements 66 

(b) Style 67 

LECTURE IV 71 

PERSONALITY IN HISTORY 

1. Statement of the Problem 72 

2. Conflicting Theories . . 73 

3. Method of Procedure 75 

(a) Classical Times 75 

(6) The Middle Ages 76 

(c) Dawn of New Conditions 77 

4. Results 79 

(a) Two Inferences 79 

(6) Their Application to Indian History .... 80 

INDEX 83 



THE HANDLING OF 
HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

INTRODUCTION 

If a competent person should compile an account of all the 
histories which have been produced since the days when man 
first set down in writing the events of time past, perhaps the 
most interesting, and certainly the most important, of his 
epochs would be the century which has last slipped away. 
For while the art of historical writing has never stood still, 
the changes which have come over that art in the course of the 
nineteenth century are beyond comparison the most far- 
reaching which have yet been experienced. During that period 
grew to maturity the theories which at present shape our ideas 
of historical study and determine our attitude towards 
historians. The outward and visible sign of these changes 
was the growth of the four great national schools of history 
in Europe, of which the characteristics and achievements are 
well portrayed in a recent book. 1 But beneath the more 
obvious surface-manifestations there may be detected an 
essential transformation which has affected the whole province 
of historical writing. To say that the present is the age of the 
specialist may savour of the commonplace ; but in the field of 
the historian the statement has an importance which redeems 
it from banality, summing up as it does in a single sentence the 
achievements of more than one hundred years of startling 
progress. So lately as the conclusion of the eighteenth 

1 G. P. Gooch. History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, 
1913. 

1 B 



2 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

century, the word " history ;; had possessed no technical signi- 
ficance. It was used in a loose fashion to embrace all species 
of writing professedly dealing with the events of the past. 
At one end of the scale were to be found monkish chronicles, 
with their meagre entries of festivals and death days, their 
prolix accounts of miraculous cures, their jargon of Latin 
etymology and vernacular syntax. At the other extreme were 
the grandiloquent Histories of the Universe, full of sound, but 
empty of sense, which appealed to the taste of our ancestors 
two centuries ago. In the one comprehensive category were 
included works so different in character and so unequal in 
importance as Madox's authoritative treatise on the English 
Court of Exchequer, and Goldsmith's History of England. 
Each production was a History : and the fact that one, written 
by an expert, was very good, while the other, written by an 
amateur, was very bad, constituted a secondarj^ consideration, 
which might perhaps influence the judgment of the few but 
was wholly beyond the ken of the many. It was in the course 
of the following century that the great change took place. 
Gradually the writing of history ceased to be a business in 
which the amateur, even in the judgment of the mass of man- 
kind, started upon an equal footing with the expert. This 
revolution came about in two ways : first, through an extension 
of the field of historical research ; secondly, through an im- 
provement in the methods by which such research is conducted. 
In consequence of the development along these two lines, 
there has grown up a general admission that the writing of 
history is a business for the craftsman and not for the mechanic. 
Regarded from a more comprehensive point of view, this 
technical improvement in the historian's art falls into rank 
among the many similar improvements which distinguished 
the great " Scientific Age " of the nineteenth century. Like 
them, it sprang in no small degree from the attitude of mind 
which was eminently characteristic of the period. In conse- 
quence of a remarkable series of discoveries in the realm 
of the natural sciences, there arose an intellectual stimulus 
comparable only to those which in former times had been 



INTRODUCTION 3 

associated with the revival of classical learning in Europe, or 
with the discovery of the New World. In the minds of the 
more alert this impulse produced a craving for exact know- 
ledge, singularly combined with an unquestioning belief that 
such knowledge must, if properly sought, be obtainable under 
all circumstances. In every branch of study, the demand 
was for " hard facts." General statements, however indis- 
putable, however valuable as working hypotheses, were 
received with impatience, being regarded, somewhat unjustly, 
as the refuge of the amateur or the sign-manual of the in- 
competent. It was this new spirit which so quickly wrought 
a change in the sphere of historical study. Time-honoured 
statements as to the wickedness of a Borgia, the duplicity of a 
Clive or the ambition of a Hastings, which had passed un- 
challenged for many years as the current coin of the realm of 
history, were no longer accepted at their face value, but were 
scrutinised with meticulous care. Those which did not admit 
of instant proof were condemned, often without due con- 
sideration. Never was there such havoc among the idols of 
the market-place. Reputable historians started upon their 
forays in the spirit of Mahmud Batshikan, defacing or destroy- 
ing much that commanded the unreasoning veneration of the 
multitude. The story of the foundation of Rome, the story 
of Alfred and the Cakes, the story of William Tell, followed each 
other in rapid succession from the heaven of authentic history 
to the limbo of discredited myth. Fortified by such successes 
as these, the new critical spirit in a short time revolutionised 
the attitude adopted by modern historians towards the ancient 
masters of their craft. To the genuine, if undiscriminating, 
reverence of earlier days there succeeded an epoch of severe, 
perhaps ungenerous, scrutiny. The testimony of a single 
author, however eminent, was regarded with suspicion. 
Individual judgments and opinions were discounted, as being 
subject to the distorting influence of the " personal equation " 
— a factor for which no correction could be made with reason- 
able prospect of accuracy. Last among the consequences of 
the new spirit was the growth of a strong prejudice against 



4 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

the employment of literary style in the writing of history, lest 
the writer should succumb to the temptation of sacrificing 
truth for the sake of art. 

As may well be imagined, the exponents of the new critical 
school of history did not escape some absurdities, among the 
most interesting of which was a denial of the reality of their 
own study. The self-styled " scientific " historians, repre- 
sented in France by the disciples of Comte and in England by 
Spencer and Buckle, trained themselves to look upon history 
as a quarry for the material out of which was to be constructed 
a science of politics ; or as a mine furnishing ore, valuable 
indeed, but requiring to be torn from its place, to be cleansed 
in the fire, and to be beaten into shape before it could possess 
either beauty or utility. It never seems to have entered the 
mind of these historians that history is no mere museum 
of inanimate objects, but something which lives, and moves, 
and has a being. 1 Fortunately, such doctrines were not 
characteristic of the general current of thought. On the 
whole, the effect of the new critical spirit upon historical 
studies was good. Even that inexplicable neglect of the 
personal element which vitiated the work of the school just 
mentioned was not without its healthy side. For this at least 
must in justice be said of it : it fostered a tendency to penetrate 
behind all ordinary channels of information : to distrust com- 
pilations even in the guise of chronicles : and to seek such 
historical sources as by their nature ran little risk of contamina- 
tion at the hands of ignorant or interested persons. As a 
direct result of this, the historian has found himself confronted 
with a vastly extended field. He has now to deal with material 
of many different kinds, but few of which were employed by 
historians of the older schools. There has thus arisen a great 
distinction between the ancient and the modern methods of 
historical investigation. Nowadays, if research in any branch 
of study is to be successful it cannot be undertaken in haphazard 

1 It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that such theories are no 
longer accepted unreservedly by any historian of repute, despite the 
ingenious attempt to revive them under a new form which distinguishes 
the late Sir John Seeley's tenure of the Cambridge Chaiiv 



INTRODUCTION 5 

or extempore fashion ; and the historian, like any other 
investigator, has to undergo careful and systematic training in 
the handling of his material. For the keynote of the new school 
of history is precisely this : each species of historical material 
can only be employed to the best advantage when it is called 
upon to furnish a particular kind of historical evidence ; and 
in order that this may be done it must be handled in a particular 
way. It is, indeed, the principal object of this course of 
lectures to assist in a clearer realisation both of the nature of the 
special training which characterises the modern student of 
history, and of the reasons which make it necessary that this 
training should be undergone. As a beginning, I propose to 
summarise the characteristics of the principal sources of 
information which the historian has to consider. I shall then 
point out briefly the kind of information which may be derived 
with the greatest advantage from each source in turn, and 
shall say something of the special difficulties attendant upon 
its employment. 



LECTURE I 

Official Documents 



OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 

1. Classification of Evidence. 

(i) Non-Documentary. 
{a) Epigraphy. 

(b) Numismatics. 

(c) Archaeology, 
(ii) Documentary. 

(a) Formal Official : 1. Treaties. 2. Charters. 

3. Grants. 4. Kolls. 5. Writs. 

(b) Informal Official : 1. Correspondence. 2. Ee- 

ports. 3. Announcements. 

(c) Formal Non-official : 1. Legal Eecords. 2. Fi- 

nancial Eecords. 

(d) Informal Non-official: 1. Chronicles. 2. Me- 

moirs. 3. Letters. 

2. Official Documents. 

(a) Formal — General Characteristics. 

1. The Treaty. 

2. The Charter. 

3. The Grant. 

4. The Eoll. 

5. The Writ. 

(b) Informal. 

1. Correspondence. 

2. Eeports. 

3. Announcements. 



LECTUKE I 

Historical material may be divided for convenience into two Classifica- 
principal departments, documentary and non-documentary. t ^f^ 
In the first department I include all evidence which depends 
for its validity upon the written or printed word : in the second 
department, all evidence which does not so depend. Of the 
two, the former is the more important ; as a general rule, 
indeed, it may be said that historians always exhaust the 
documentary material at their disposal before they think of 
turning to the non-documentary. The latter, generally 
speaking, is employed rather as a supplementary than as a 
primary source of information. But where documentary 
material is either absent or is gravely deficient, non-documen- 
tary material becomes of the highest moment. This is 
particularly the case when it is a question of very remote 
times : for documentary material is highly perishable by 
nature, and it may easily happen that not a single fragment 
survives to guide the historian, who is thus driven to rely 
entirely upon evidence derived from the alternative source. 
In these lectures, however, I shall assume that my audience, 
like myself, is concerned principally with the history of 
those relatively modern times for the investigation of which 
ample stores of documentary materials exist. It will thus 
be possible to dismiss the other kind of material with a brief 
mention before we proceed to discuss in some detail the sources 
which concern us more nearly. 

Non-documentary evidence may be considered under three Non-docu- 

heads, each constituting a branch of study which requires ™ entair y 

• i -L- -Hi • j. i 1 • , ? Evidence. 

special apprenticeship. First, and most important, is 

9 



10 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

Epigraphy, the science of inscriptions, whether these be found 

1. Epi- upon metal, stone or clay. Epigraphy is of vital importance 
graphy. ^- ^ historian of ancient times, for its material, being almost 

imperishable, frequently survives long after all other kinds of 
historical evidence have crumbled to decay. But the informa- 
tion which it affords, while unattainable from any other source, 
is generally fragmentary, imperfect, and therefore difficult to 
handle. None the less, the historian of the distant past must 
laboriously piece together his disjointed information, as one 
who should attempt to solve a Chinese puzzle when half the 
pieces are missing ; but the historian of modern times can 
usually pass blithely on to the stores of better evidence which 
lie at his disposal. This cannot be said with the same truth 

2. Numis- about Numismatics, the study of coinage. The subject is, 
matics. indeed, highly technical, and the historian has frequently 

to rely upon the judgment of the professed expert. But from 
the mere fact that Numismatics has rendered important 
services to chronology, we shall be able to see that it may 
sometimes be almost as important to the modern as to the 
ancient historian. The inscription upon a coin has solved 
many a puzzling problem, has provided a fixed date for a 
monarch or for a dynasty of whose position in time we had 
previously but the vaguest notion, or has served to indicate 
with precision the geographical limits of some sovereign's 
dominions in a particular year. 1 As students of Indian 
history, we must not forget the debt we owe to coinage. 
Without the help of Numismatics the history of Ancient India 
would be in a far less satisfactory condition than is actually 
the case 2 — and this, I think you will agree with me, is saying a 
good deal. Much, indeed, may be learnt from coins besides 
chronology. The mere appearance of a piece of money is 
often eloquent of the culture stage of the people among whom 

1 This latter use of the science is one which requires some care. 
Napoleon I's coins with the inscription ' ; struck at London " do not 
constitute the only example of an intending concpieror's involuntary 
falsification of numismatical evidence. 

2 Cf., for example, the extensive use made of numismatical evidence 
both by McCrindle (Ancient India) and Mr. Vincent Smith. 



OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 11 

it circulated. A coin cleanly struck, elegant in shape and 
artistic in design, testifies plainly to a high degree of civilisa- 
tion. On the other hand, a clumsy rough-hewn coin is the 
token either of a disturbed condition of society, or of a dynasty 
caring little for culture or refinement. Occasionally, though 
not often, the design will contain some hint of the actual 
personality of the ruler ; as is the case with the eccentric, 
lozenge-shape outlines favoured by Akbar, or the shameless \ 
wine-cup portrait which appears upon the coins of Jahangir 
his son. 1 The material from which a coin is struck will some- 
times tell a tale. An abundant gold coinage testifies to pros- 
perity, commercial expansion, and enterprise on the part of 
the administration. At the other extreme a copper coinage, 
unrelieved by gold or silver, is a sign of poverty and backward- 
ness. Very interesting are the reflections of a sudden national 
catastrophe such as Timur's invasion of Hindustan in 1398, 
So complete and so terrible was his sack of Delhi that the un- 
fortunate city was swept clean of the precious metals. For 
half a century afterwards its mints issued little but copper 
coinage. From examples such as the foregoing it becomes 
evident that Numismatics may profitably be employed even 
by the historian of modern times ; but his indebtedness never 
equals the figure reached by his brother the ancient historian, 
whose sources of information are usually inferior alike in 
quality and in quantity. Third among the classes of non- 
documentary material may be reckoned that which must, for 
lack of a better term, be called the Archaeological. Archaeology, 3. Archas- 
as I understand it, is the study of those intimate details of olo §y- 
existence which cannot find a place in ordinary historical 
narrative. Architecture, public and private : the fine and 
the domestic arts : the weapons of war and of the chase : 
costume — such are some of the varied lines along which the 
archaeologist directs his energy. Now the evidence furnished 

1 S. Lane Poole. Catalogue of Indian Coins in the British Museum 
(1892). 

R. B. Whitehead. Catalogue of the Coins in the Panjab Museum-, 
Lahore, Vol. II. 



12 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

by this kind of material is of much indirect value to the 
historian, for it enables him to realise, in a way which would 
otherwise be impossible, the conditions imposed upon every- 
day existence during the period with which he is concerned. 
It assists him to understand the manners of the age : to 
visualise a battlefield or a hunting incident : to interpret an 
allusion or an innuendo. Such information does verily clothe 
the dry bones of history with flesh, so that the Past rises from 
its grave and appears as a scene of many-sided human activi- 
ties. The long-dead heroes and sages with whom the historian 
deals spring into life at the touch of his pen, and cease for the 
moment to be names appended to long lists of exploits half 
remembered. Archaeology is, indeed, a study of rare fascina- 
tion, and for this very reason must be employed with due 
caution by the historian, ancient or modern. The ancient 
historian cannot, as a matter of fact, always afiord to be too 
scrupulous. By a caprice of chance it well may happen that 
the costume, the manners, and even the appearance of a people 
are familiar to him through frescoes or carvings, while he is 
utterly ignorant of a single fact or a single date in the whole 
course of that people's history. 1 The modern historian, how- 
ever, is in a more advantageous position, and cannot put 
forward the plea of necessity when the archaeological element 
usurps an unduly large share of his attention. For unless the 
minutice of history are kept in their proper position of sub- 
ordination to the main thread of the narrative, history itself 
becomes a mere catalogue of the entertaining habits of our 
ancestors, joined to an occasional excursion into what an 
unsympathetic Elizabethan has called " Y e beastlie devices of 
y e heathen." 
Docu- With this as preface, I must pass on quickly to the second, 

Evidence anc ^ ^ or our P ur P oses more important, division of historical 
Official material. Documentary material may for convenience be 

a7id Non- divided j n t two main headings, Official and Non-official. 

official. ° ' 

1 C£, for example, our detailed knowledge of the civilisation of the 
Minoan period with our ignorance of the events which constituted the 
history of the peoples responsible for it. 



OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 13 

It should be noted that I reckon a document as Official when 
it proceeds from some member of the governing class acting 
in his public capacity, and as Non-official when such is not the 
case. That is to say, the distinction depends upon the source 
from which the document proceeds, and is wholly independent 
alike of its contents and of its importance. We shall see before 
long that the difference between the two kinds of documents 
is real, necessitating the employment of slightly different 
treatment ; but for the present it is sufficient to point out its 
existence. Now each of the main headings, Official and Non- 
official, falls neatly into divisions, Formal and Informal. So 
that we have in all four species of documents : Formal and The Four 
Informal Official; Formal and Informal Non-official l S J^ 80 f 
propose to deal with them in the order here suggested. Starting me nt'ary 
with the material which falls under the official heading, we Evidence. 
come first of all to Formal documents. In this class are Formal 
comprised all documents drawn up by public authority in set Offi cml 
form, whether this authority proceeds from the King, or from mm ts : 
some subordinate official appointed by him. The most 1. The 
mportant examples of this class of document are treaties, Treaty * 
charters, grants of privilege, and writs. The treaty may be 
considered first, as being the most formal of all. It is invariably 
drawn up in a manner carefully prescribed, and is reserved 
for transactions of international importance, which are either 
themselves of the highest moment, or which pass between 
individuals of the highest rank. Next in solemnity comes the 2. The 
charter, generally a precise statement of the relations existing Charter, 
between political superior and political inferior. The grantor 
is generally the King, or some official high in his service, while 
the grantee is generally either a corporate body, or an individual 
of eminence. Third come grants, conferring land, privileges, 3. The 
or trading rights. These also are usually drawn up in a form Grant - 
carefully prescribed by current practice ; but may be used for 
transactions between a Government or highly placed personage 
on the one hand, and some comparatively insignificant indi- 
vidual on the other. Fourth are the official accounts of pro- 4. The 
ceedings in courts of justice, such as were kept by the English Eo11, 



14 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 



5. The 
Writ, 



Informal 
Official 
Docu- 
ments : 

1. Corre- 
spond- 
ence. 

2. Re- 
ports. 
{a) Con- 
fidential. 
(b) Non- 
confiden- 
tial. 

3. An- 
nounce- 
ments. 



Formal 
Non- 
official 
Docu- 
ments : 

1. Private 
legal 
records. 

2. Finan- 
cial 
records. 

Informal 
Unofficial 
Docu- 
ments : 
1. Chroni- 
cles. 



Courts of Record from the early middle ages down to the present 
day. Lastly we have the Writ, a short formal communication 
employed to notify the orders or intentions of the Government 
to Government servants or to private individuals. 

The next division of our main heading comprises the class 
of documents which I call Informal, because, though they 
proceed from the pen of officials, they are not drawn up in 
accordance with any prescribed pattern. The first example 
of this class is the correspondence carried on by persons in the 
service of the Government, either with other Government 
servants, or with outsiders. The second example is provided 
by the reports of agents, employed to keep the Government 
informed of the progress of events, either in foreign countries, 
or in distant portions of the kingdom. These reports, as we 
shall see, are of two kinds, confidential and non- confidential, 
each kind presenting certain definite characteristics. Thirdly, 
we have official announcements, proclamations and the like : 
in which category may be included official records of current 
happenings, issued by governmental authority, and drawn up 
in accordance with official views. Of these also, as may be 
imagined, more than one kind has to be considered. 

I now pass on to the second main heading, Non-official 
documents, which may be dealt with under the same two 
divisions, formal and informal. The principal examples of 
the first, the formal, class, are testaments and deeds of gift, 
lease, or sale — in other words, the records of the legal trans- 
actions of private individuals, or, it may be, of public servants 
acting in their private capacity. Lastly we have the ledgers 
and account-books, which, when they happen to survive, throw 
so much light upon the status of the individuals who owned 
them. The second, the informal, division is much more 
various, for in it are included all documents connected with 
the life of private persons save those which have been classified 
under headings already mentioned. First in importance come 
Chronicles, accounts of interesting or important events which 
happened to come under the notice of the author, whether he 
witnessed them himself or whether he gathered his information 



OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 15 

from the observations of other people. Next we have Memoirs, 2. Me- 
which may be said to consist first of the large and very im- moirs ' 
portant class of itineraries and travellers' narratives : secondly, ffi Auto- 
of autobiographies, the reminiscences of men who played biography, 
important parts in the life of their day, and, when that day ( c .) Remi * 
was over, beguiled their enforced leisure by confiding to paper 
their recollections for the amusement or the instruction of the 
younger generation : thirdly, the memoirs of those who, while 
themselves of little importance in worldly affairs, happen to 
have been thrown into contact with the great ones of the 
earth, so that they have found themselves moved to record their 
impressions of the character and the achievements of such 
notabilities. Next in importance may be reckoned the corre- 3. Letters, 
spondence of private individuals, mainly, of course, concerned 
with private affairs ; but not infrequently adverting to events 
of public interest. 

From this brief enumeration of the types of documents 
which constitute the bulk of the material at the disposal of the 
historian, I think you will already begin to see the justification 
for the method which I have employed in their consideration. 
It is not merely for the sake of clearness in handling that I 
have chosen to divide documentary material under the headings 
Official and Non-official ; it is because the difference between 
the two classes is so marked that they yield to the historian 
information of radically different kinds. If I had to express 
the difference in rough and summary form, I should feel 
inclined to say that the historian depends upon Official docu- 
ments for information concerning time, place, and obvious 
fact ; while from Non-official documents he seeks to discover 
motives, explanations, and facts which lie beneath the surface 
of events. 

It is in consequence of this difference that the two kinds 
of documents cannot be handled in precisely similar fashion. 
Each must be subjected to the treatment best calculated to 
extract from it the particular information which it is fitted to 
supply. 

With this foreword, we can proceed to examine very 



16 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

briefly the various kinds of documentary material which we 

have classified, the method adopted being as follows. First 

of all the general characteristics of each division will be 

noted, and the general cautions to be observed when dealing 

with that division will be deduced. Then the particular 

characteristics of each of the kinds of document included 

within that division will be examined, and the particular 

cautions to be observed when handling those kinds mil be 

determined. 

Charac- The first thing to be noticed about the (< Formal Official " 

tenshcs of documents, is the terms in which they are drawn up. Their 

Formal . . J . * 

Official language is stereotyped, and the successive clauses are arranged 

Boon- in such a manner that they look like a chain of rigid formulae. 
Frequently, indeed, a document of this class is built up in a 
definite structure, consecrated by time and tradition, into 
which no change is allowed to creep. 1 The consequence of this 

£_£ _ is obvious. The first caution which the historian has to 
observe when dealing with Formal documents is the danger of 
basing arguments upon the exact words employed, which may 
not bear any relation to the conditions existing at the time 
when the document was drawn up. For since the time when 
the formal method of expression employed by the writer had 
first come into being, many changes may have taken place of 
which the language gives no indication. While the formula 
describing some institution remains the same, the whole spirit 
of the institution may have undergone a profound change. 
To make this clearer, let us take a concrete illustration. 
Imagine an historian of the thirtieth century a.d., who is 
dealing with the English parliament of the twentieth century, 
and is engaged in piecing together the few scraps of evidence 
which have managed to survive the ravages of time. Among 
these scraps there happens to be a great prize — nothing less 
than a Parliamentary Writ, of the kind employed at the 
present day. In that Writ our imaginary historian finds the 
famous " Praemunientes " clause, bidding the clergy send to 

1 Such a collection as Earle's Land Charters affords many documents 
which illustrate this. Cf., for example, No. 43. 



OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 17 

Parliament representatives elected by their own order. 1 Now 
unless he happened to know that this clause was a survival 
from the yet remoter age of the fourteenth century, that it was 
retained merely because it had never been removed, that it 
had long been a dead letter in the twentieth century, would 
he not form a wholly incorrect notion of the manner of thing 
that is the English Parliament of our time ? And it must be 
plain to all that the chances are certainly against this essential 
piece of information being at his disposal. The characteristic 
illustrated by this example is one of the greatest difficulties 
attendant upon the employment of Formal Official documents 
as sources of historical evidence. Nor is this all. Formal Liability 
Official documents commonly deal with matters of high import- 1° 
ance, and occasionally these matters are of a nature which 
causes them to affect vitally the fortunes of individuals or 
corporations. 2 The documents themselves are thus particu- 
larly liable to falsification : for while their great moment 
renders them in certain cases eminently worth forging, their 
stereotyped mode of expression makes the work of the skilful 
forger particularly hard to detect. 3 It is sometimes a matter 
of great difficulty to decide upon the authenticity of an impor- 
tant document : and of late a special science, technically 
known as Diplomatics, has grown up, of which the principal The 
function is to pronounce upon the authenticity of a given piece ^5-ction 
of documentary evidence. We have already noticed that a matics. " 
Formal Official document consists of a number of definite 
parts, each of which is essential to the validity of the whole. 
Now Diplomatics investigates in detail the relation of these 
component elements to the main structure. So much progress 
has been made along these lines that experts can generally 

1 Stubbs. Select Charters (IXth edition), p. 480. 

2 This was particularly the case with monastic houses in mediaeval 
Europe. Cf. the " doctored " charters of St. Albans Abbey in British 
Museum, MS. Cotton Nero D i. } f. 148. 

3 The reverse is, of course, equally true : the clumsy forger quickly 
exposes himself by making a blunder in some technical detail. Cf. the 
land-grants embodied by Matthew Paris in his commonplace book 
Chronica Majora, vol. VI (Rolls Series), ed. Luard. 



18 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

decide whether a document is genuine or fabricated by sub- 
jecting it clause by clause to a series of tests which, should it 
be authentic, it will rigidly fulfil. There is, however, one 
Employ- caution which must here be given. A document which fails 
ment of ^ Q sa ti s fy all the tests to which it is subjected cannot be thrown 
docu- on one side as being worthless from the point of view of the 
merits. historian. Despite its doubtful character, it may possibly be 
authentic in large degree, and garbled only in the single point 
which concerned the interest of the forger. So much, indeed, 
is this the case, that many of the most important historical 
documents available as evidence for the earlier portions of 
English history 1 are preserved to us only in copies which 
have, in certain minor points, been tampered with for private 
ends. And it remains the absorbing, but delicate, task of 
the historian to sift the good elements in a document of this 
character from the bad, so that it may be possible to base 
sound conclusions upon a piece of evidence which shows evident 
signs of manipulation by private persons in their own interest. 
Two The two reservations which must be made when we are 

reserva- dealing with a Formal Official document are, then, these : 
First, the language of the document may be misleading : 
secondly, the document may not be genuine. 

These two possibilities being taken into account, we can now 
proceed to examine briefly the value of Formal Official docu- 
ments as historical material. Let us look first of all at the two 
The value most Formal and most Official, namely, the treaty and the 
of the charter. From the point of view of the historian, they possess 
and the two great advantages which make them much sought after. 
Charter. Eirst, the time when the document was drawn up, and the place 
where it was promulgated, are generally stated with great 
precision. That is to say, we know, with absolute certainty, that 
the transaction referred to in the document was concluded at a 
particular time and in a particular place. Secondly, there are 

1 As, for example, in the case of the history of England before the 
Norman Conquest. Without the help of the documents which Kemble 
(with reason) marked as " suspected," our materials would be scanty 
indeed. Cf. Codex Diplomaticus, clxii., etc. 



OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 19 

sometimes attached to the document lists of witnesses, and 
these lists are of the highest value, as you will soon realise. 
The use to which a document of this kind is put may be illus- 
trated somewhat as follows. Suppose that we are engaged in 
investigating the career of a given individual A, and that this 
individual is among the witnesses to a Formal Official document. 
We can be absolutely certain that A was present at the time 
and in the place mentioned in the document, and that he lent 
his hand to a transaction of the particular kind in question. 
Further, the other witnesses will often be persons of whom we 
have information of one kind or another from some independent 
source, so that we are able to form some idea of the kind of 
persons with whom, on this occasion at any rate, our individual 
was thrown into contact. 1 Moreover, these lists of witnesses 
have other uses. Not only will they serve to establish beyond 
dispute the fact that a man was living, was active in political 
life, or was enjoying some particular office, at a given time ; 
but they will also serve as a check upon the authenticity of 
other documents of a similar character. For example, if in 
document No. I, of which we know nothing, somebody is 
put down as holding an office which, on the established authority 
of document No. II, we know he did not hold : if in document 
No. I. he is made to figure among a list of witnesses at a time 
when we know, from document No. Ill — also of unimpeach- 
able character — that he was far away from the spot where the 
attestation is alleged to have taken place ; or if in document 
No. I he is mentioned as living at a date when we are certain, 
from the evidence of II and III, or perhaps even of another 
document, which we will call IV, that he was as a matter of 
fact dead, then we shall not be far wrong if we condemn the 
unknown document No. I as a forgery. The next kind of The 
document with which we are concerned is the grant, which Grant - 
confers upon the grantee land, revenues, or commercial 

1 As an illustration of the brilliant results which may be achieved by 
this method when employed by the expert, the reader may be referred 
to Mr. J. Horace Round's essay on Geoffrey de Mandeville. A similar 
thing has been attempted in my paper on " William the Chamberlain " 
(English Historical Review, xxviii., 719 seq.). 



20 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

privileges. As may well be imagined, these documents are 
particularly liable to forgery, since large monetary interests are 
frequently involved. They have, therefore, to be scrutinised 
with more than ordinary care, so that any falsification may be 
detected, and due allowance made. They do not present any 
features which call for remark, beyond the light they throw 
upon the status and the authority of the parties concerned. 
The Roll. Fourthly we have the proceedings of Courts of Record, which 
in many respects afford a complete contrast to the other kinds 
of Formal Official documents. For while they are not infre- 
quently drawn up in the most rigid and inelastic form which 
official routine can prescribe, they are mainly concerned, not 
with high affairs of policy or even with impressive commercial 
interests, but merely with the private life of particular in- 
dividuals. 1 Their importance lies chiefly in the information 
they furnish as to the social condition of the nation at large. 
For when we know the sort of wrongs which men were inflicting 
upon each other — or were accused of inflicting upon each other 
— we can form a very good idea of what the conditions of 
existence were like at the time. Many different kinds of 
questions may be cleared up with the help of such evidence, 
not the least important being the precise efficiency of the local 
government : the integrity of officials, local and central : and 
even the moral character of the community at large. Further, 
if we happen to be interested in any of the individuals of whose 
litigation the records take notice, we can sometimes obtain 
detailed information as to his life and character of a sort that 
would otherwise be entirely wanting. 2 For in a court of law 
there frequently leaks out information which the parties con- 
cerned would give much to conceal from prying eyes ; and of 

1 The Year Books which are being edited by Professor Vinogradoff 
for the Selden Society are excellent examples of the type of evidence 
which I have in mind. 

2 Apart from evidence of this kind, we should know far less even than 
we do of the lives of men of such eminence as Chaucer and Shakespeare. 
It is greatly to be hoped that evidence of a conclusive kind will result 
from the labours of certain American scholars, who are working through 
thousands of legal documents of Shakespeare's time in the hope of 
throwing fresh light upon the enigma of his life. 



OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 21 

all this the historian may take advantage. Lastly, we have The Writ, 
the Writ, often a document of the briefest and most summary 
character, conveying an order or an authorisation from the 
Government to some individual. Generally speaking, these 
can furnish us with very little information, unless the order 
they convey happens to be an extremely significant one, like 
the death warrant of Charles I. of England, 1 or Kasim Ali 
Khan's warrant for the massacre of Patna in 1763 ; 2 but they 
share the general characteristic of Formal Official documents 
in that the time and place of their issue are usually stated with 
accuracy, and this of itself frequently makes them of no small 
service to the historian. 

We now come to deal with Informal Official documents, Informal 
which are among the most valuable sources of information at ®ffi cial 
the disposal of the historian. They consist, as we have seen, me nts. 
of official correspondence, of the reports of political agents, 
of proclamations, and inspired accounts of current events. 
Materials of nature so diverse may seem at first sight to have 
little in common beyond their official origin ; but closer 
examination reveals in all of them one important characteristic. 
The matters with which they deal, whether affairs of high 
policy or details of official routine, belong to the province of 
government. More than this : these matters are treated in Their 
authoritative fashion : are looked at, as it were, from the op 111111011 

PnP T*fi P ■ 

inside, in the light of a knowledge which is not common property, teristics. 
Thus, in employing Informal Official documents as historical 
material, there are two obvious cautions to be borne in mind. Two 
First, these documents express only a single aspect of the cautl0U8 - 
topics with which they deal : they give us the standpoint of 
those in authority, but they do not necessarily tell us all the 
facts of the case, or even those facts which we, from our latter- 
day point of view, might be inclined to regard as possessing 
the highest moment. Secondly, they are easy to misinterpret, 
since they commonly take for granted a considerable amount 

1 Gardiner. Documents of the Puritan Revolution, p. 380. 
3 I have examined the contemporary copy which exists among Lord 
Olive's papers, now in the possession of the Earl of Powis. 



r 



ence. 



22 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

of knowledge, whether of persons, of places, or of administrative 
detail, which is not always accessible from other sources. 
On the other side of the scale must be placed one great advan- 
tage, which by itself makes them of great importance as sources 
of evidence : they represent the authoritative view of affairs 
the view held by men whose opinions were of consequence. 
Whether this opinion was right or wrong is not infrequently 
a secondaiy consideration, the point is that it influenced the 
decision of persons who shaped in one way or another the 
course of history. 
Corre- First among the kinds of Informal Official documents comes 

spond- correspondence, whether carried on by members of the govern- 
ing class among themselves, or between members of the govern- 
ing class and private individuals. 1 Of this correspondence 
there exists a vast bulk in all official libraries : much of it is, 
for reasons of state, still withheld from the historian. From 
this source may be learnt many particulars of the inner 
workings of state machinery : of the personal characteristics 
of men behind the scenes : of the wires which in the last 
resort directed the movements of the principal actors. Often 
it is important to determine with precision how far some 
particular action represents deliberate policy on the part of 
a government, and how far it springs either from a single ill- 
considered step, or from the discretionary authority which 
must be allowed to the executive side of the administration. 
In such questions as the assignment of responsibility for deeds 
held up to universal execration, such as the massacre of St. 
Bartholomew's Day, the slaughter at Glencoe, or the tragedy 
of the Black Hole, the importance of the evidence afforded by 
official correspondence can hardly be over-estimated. It is a 
red-letter day in the annals of historical study when a collection 
of such correspondence, hitherto kept from the student by 
lock and key, is thrown open for investigation. In many 
respects it was the beginning of a new era in the study of 

1 Cf., for example, the official correspondence calendared in the 
Calendar of Letters, Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the reign o Henry 
VIII. 



OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 23 

mediaeval Europe when the great Vatican Library, so long 
preserved with jealous care from the intrusion of profane 
speculation, was placed to some extent at the service of all fit 
persons. The mass of material which is being more fully- 
explored year by year has already provided the solution of 
some famous historical mysteries. 1 

But if the information contained in official correspondence 
is of extreme importance, it is unfortunately true that material 
of this kind requires particularly careful handling. The 
cautions just now applied to the whole class of Informal Two 
Official documents are in eminent degree applicable to the cautlons - 
kind with which we are dealing. In the first place, the state- 
ments of officials, high or low, whether made for the benefit 
of other officials or of private individuals, are frequently 
disingenuous ; and even when they represent a frank expres- 
sion of opinion, they reveal but a single aspect of affairs. 
Secondly, the writers of such letters were generally able to 
assume in the recipient a knowledge of state policy or of 
administrative detail which may be beyond the reach of the 
historian. Hence it follows that the impression produced by" 1 " 111 . 
reading official correspondence of an earlier generation is often 
very different from that which the letters were intended to 
produce upon the minds of those to whom they were addressed. 
Thus it frequently happens that from a casual inspection of 
official correspondence — let us say, of the East India Company 
in last decades of the eighteenth century — we carry away a 
misleading, because over-simplified, idea of the machinery of 
administration and of the personalities by whom that machinery 
was directed. 

The second type of Informal Official documents consists of 
Reports presented by local agents to the central authority. Reports. 
These reports fall, as we have said, into two well defined 
classes, confidential and non-confidential, and are often the 
work of entirely distinct kinds of officials. In the later Mughal 

1 E.g. the responsibility for some of the crimes formerly assigned to 
Cesare Borgia, has been definitely shifted by the new materials brought 
to light and utilised by Dr. Pastor in his History oftJie Papacy, 



24 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

administration, as is well-known, there were two separate 
kinds of news-writers, the waqi'a nawis or public reporters, 1 
and the khufiya naivis, or secret service reporters. The two 
classes differed considerably in status. The former were high 
Court officials, who were privileged to attend the audiences, 
and constituted a select, limited body ; the latter were merely 
police agents, whose business brought them little honour and 
less prominence. The reports of public agents naturally 
contain only such information as the government desired to 
remain on record for general inspection ; while the reports of 
secret agents contain the information upon which the govern- 
ment itself acted. It naturally follows that the secret reports 
are of incomparably greater value to the historian ; but, as 
may well be supposed, they are not readily obtainable. The 
reports of the confidential news-writers spoken of in the 
Tuzukat-i-Timuri 2 would not only be extremely interesting, 
were they preserved, but they would certainly provide us with 
the inner history of many events which the Zafar-Nama 3 
passes over in discreet silence. Evidence of this kind is par- 
ticularly valuable whenever we are in doubt as to why a certain 
course of action was adopted. For a policy which at first 
sight appears inexplicable in the light of subsequent events, will 
often appear not only natural but inevitable if the information 
which dictated it is known to us. Confidential reports are 
not, however, always the work of secret service agents. In 
mediaeval Europe — and the same holds good to some extent 
to-day — it was part of the duty of every envoy, ambassador 
or consul to post his government in all matters of importance 
which transpired in the place where he was stationed. In a 
long series of such reports there will be contained information 
of great value. As an illustration of this statement, we may 
remember that since the Venetian archives, containing the 
Reports of the Venetian agents, have become accessible to 

1 Ayeen Akberi, ed. Jagadis Mukhopadhyaya, pp. 177 seq. 

2 Tuzulcat-i-Timuri, ed. Davy and White, p. 349. 

• Zajar Nama of Maulana Sharafu-d-din 'Ali Yazdi abridged by 
Petis de la Croix in the well known Histoire de Timur Bee. - 



OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 25 

students, almost every European country has been compelled 
to rewrite certain portions of its own history. 1 

We must, however, be on our guard against accepting 
these Keports as representing a true picture of the circum- 
stances which they claim to portray. The evidence they afford 
is of extremely unequal value. An incompetent diplomatist 
— and incompetent diplomatists are by no means peculiar 
to modern times — would often transmit to his government 
any idle or baseless rumour which chanced to find an 
echo in his own hopes or fears. The home government 
naturally did its best to discourage the practice ; and Timur's 
habit of mutilating the hand of the writer who unwittingly 
conveyed false information is not without its parallel in 
administrations of far later date. Granting, however, that the 
agent was an honest, shrewd man, it does not follow that his 
reports can be relied upon with absolute confidence. The 
information transmitted by a competent agent is generally 
first hand, minute, and, so far as it goes, adequate. But it is 
necessarily incomplete, since the astutest agent cannot fathom 
all the motives or forecast all the plans of the individuals he 
is watching ; and it is generally one-sided, for the agent is 
apt to concentrate all his attention upon a single aspect of 
the activities of his opponents. With all these reservations, 
however, the reports of secret agents remain among the most 
valuable of the materials with which the historian has to deal. 
For obvious reasons, such reports are only accessible to the 
student when they refer to time long past. No government 
will make public the documents which bear in any way upon 
the events of recent history ; and there are some countries, 
notably the Austro-Hungarian empire, where a discreet veil 
is drawn even over diplomatic proceedings of the Middle 
Ages. 

But while the information contained in the secret reports (&) Non- 
is of such importance, it would be a mistake to suppose that ^eStial 
the reports of non-confidential character are devoid of value. Reports. 

1 Cf . the importance in Tudor History of Horatio Brown's Calendar 
of State, Payers preserved in the Venetian Archives. 



26 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

Sometimes, indeed, like the findings of modern commissions, 
they are of so technical a nature that the historian has little 
use for them except on the rare occasion when he happens to 
require the highly specialised information which they contain. 
But the Reports of Parliamentary commissions, such as those 
which deal with the East India Company, with the Public 
Records of England, or with the Historical MSS. in private 
hands, are of immense importance. Similarly, to go back to 
more ancient times, the reports of the public news- writers of 
the Mughal emperors will frequently supply information of value 
to the historian. Vast numbers of these are preserved, 
embodied in a kind of weekly bulletin, or court circular ; 1 
and they tell us much about the movements and activities of 
the Emperor concerned ; about his relations with high 
officials ; about the rewards he conferred upon his favourites. 
They have been employed to a considerable extent by Professor 
J. Sarkar in his study of the reign of Aurangzib, and have 
proved a noteworthy source of information concerning the 
details of court life. They are not, however, very trustworthy 
on certain topics. In common with the whole class to which 
they belong, they present only the official view of affairs ; and, 
in addition, they share in the defect which characterises all court 
productions — they treat the sovereign with exaggerated 
deference, so that in all matters where his honour or reputation 
are concerned, their testimony is the reverse of faithful. 
Hence it follows that the statements contained in them are 
not to be accepted on all occasions at their face value, but must 
sometimes be discounted to a considerable extent. 
An- The last type of Informal Official document is the Proclama- 

tion. This may be either an announcement of the intentions 
or commands of the government, or else an official version of 
current events. One most interesting type of proclamation 
is that issued by a monarch who is about to ascend the throne, 
or by a pretender who hopes to ascend it. Such a document 
is always full of promises of better government, and often, of 
criticism directed against the existing regime. Its principal 
1 Of. Slorid do Mogor, ed. William Irvine, III, p. 331. 



nounce- 
ments 



OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 27 

object is to secure the popularity of the issuer. An example 
which is familiar to all students of English history will serve 
to illustrate this point. When Henry I seized the throne in 
1100, his first care was to issue a proclamation in charter form, 1 
condemning the evil practices which had crept into the 
administration during the reign of his brother William, and 
promising that they should be amended. The whole document 
constitutes an indictment of the abuses of the last reign. It 
is, therefore, very one-sided, but it does at least serve to show 
what people of the time were grumbling about. Whether these 
grumblings were justified is another question, but one which 
the historian may find himself compelled to settle. Broadly 
speaking, this document is typical of the kind we are consider- 
ing. For our purposes, the feature of it is that it contains 
indirect information of great value concerning the state of 
public opinion at the time of issue. Its facts are often un- 
reliable, for it is always a partisan production. Much the same 
may be said with regard to the official versions of current 
events, such as are issued by governments in times of crisis. 
These are often disingenuous, for it is seldom to the interest of 
the authorities to publish all available facts ; and are some- 
times deliberately falsified. They are, however, useful, as 
showing what was the official view of recent happenings, 
and as affording an index of the strength or weakness of the 
government by the tone adopted towards public opinion. 

1 Stubbs. Select Charters (IXth edition), 116 seq. 



LECTURE II 
Non-official Documents 



NON-OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 

1. Formal Non-official Documents. 
General Characteristics. 

(a) The Will. 

(b) The Bond. 

(c) Accounts. 

2. Informal Non-official Documents. 

(«) The Chronicle. 
(b) The Memoir. 

(i) Travellers' Narratives, 
(ii) Autobiographies, 
(iii) Reminiscences. 



LECTUKE II 

In the course of the first lecture we examined in some little 
detail the various divisions into which historical material may 
for convenience be split up. Of the four main species of 
documentary material, Formal and Informal Official, Formal 
and Informal Non-official, two have already been considered 
in sufficient minuteness for our purpose. It now remains to 
deal with the numerous and important kinds of material which 
come under the headings Formal and Informal Non-official. 

The Formal Non-official documents are a miscellaneous Formal 
class, including, as we have seen, records of the legal trans- ^^ cd 
actions of private individuals. On the whole, they may be Docu . 
compared with Formal Official documents, from which they ments. 
mainly differ, first through the relative insignificance of the General 
affairs with which they deal ; and secondly through their £ er a istic g f 
essentially private, non-governmental character. Generally 
speaking, time and place are stated with the same precision 
as in Formal Official documents : but there is a very much 
smaller chance that the information will be of any importance. 
On the other hand, if we happen to be interested in an in- 
dividual concerning whom there is evidence derived from 
Formal Non-official documents, the importance of that 
evidence will be very considerable. It will be contemporary, 
precise, and so far as it goes, unmistakable in its significance. 
On the other hand, since documents of this class deal so largely 
with the interests of private individuals, the inducements to 
forgery are considerable ; and the relative smallness of the 
affairs therein treated makes detection difficult. 

The most important type of Formal Non-official document The Will. 

31 



32 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

is probably the Will. This is generally, though not exclusively, 
employed to settle questions of chronology : that is to say, 
as establishing the fact that a certain individual was still 
living at the precise date mentioned in the document. In 
cases when the actual Will is open to our inspection, a certain 
amount of additional information may be extracted from it. 
Light is thrown not merely upon the financial condition of 
the individual in question, but also upon his character. The 
amount of property at his disposal, and its nature : the 
relations existing between himself and other members of his 
family : the frame of mind in which he takes his leave of the 
world — such are some of the topics upon which a man's Will 
may supply information. 1 Again, the names of witnesses, 
when they have been preserved, are sometimes useful as 
establishing the presence of a certain individual at a particular 
place on a given occasion ; and an isolated piece of information 
such as this will occasionally prove of the highest importance. 
An imaginarv example will make this clear. Suppose that an 
individual A, in whom we are interested, appears as witness 
to a will at a certain time, and in a particular place. A is 
now fixed, and his range of movement restricted by the testi- 
mony of the document. Therefore, if an unfriendly writer B 
states that A was at the same time committing some act of 
knavery at another place, we shall be forced to conclude that 
the damaging statement is false. This may perhaps mean 
that we are driven to revise our whole idea, either of the 
character of A or of the credibility of B. In this connection 
there are some remarks to be made. The example chosen 
is an extreme one, put forward for the sake of simplicity. The 
cases in which evidence of an unimpeachable kind enables 
us to contradict inaccurate statements so confidently, although 
not so rare as might be thought, are unfortunately not common. 
Generally, we have to be contented if we can show that there 
is a very strong balance of probability against such a state- 
ment being true ; and even this balance has to be established 
by arguing from the known to the unknown by an elaborate 
1 Cf., for example, the will left by Shakespeare. 



NON-OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 33 

chain of reasoning, every link of which must be tested and 
retested. 

The remarks made about the Will or Testament may also be Other 
applied, with slight modification, to the deeds of bequest and of * e S al 
gift, which are generally shorter and less comprehensive. Of me nts. 
bonds there is scarcely more to be said. They do indeed throw 
light upon the financial condition of individuals at a particular 
time, and may occasionally supply an explanation for some 
action at first sight incomprehensible. Also, they will some- 
times help us to keep track with an individual and to bridge 
a gap of years between which History knows nothing of him. 
It may happen, indeed, that a bond with a Hebrew money- 
lender is the only evidence of the whereabouts, or even of the 
existence, of an individual at some particular time, even though 
the name of the person may be a household word. Our know- 
ledge of the life history of Chaucer, for example, is largely made 
up of records of his financial transactions ; and the same is 
true in even more startling degree of Shakespeare. If these 
men had not been subject to such well-marked periods of 
misfortune in business, we should know comparatively little 
about them beyond what can be gathered from their works. 
As it is, the records of their debts and troubles constitute a 
very large proportion of the total information at our disposal 
concerning them. 

A word must now be devoted to the importance of Accounts. Financial 
A complete series of Accounts, running on from year to year for a Records, 
considerable period, constitutes one of the most valuable sources 
of historical evidence. The account books of such a corpora- 
tion as the East India Company are of immense value, not 
merely to the historian of economic conditions, but also to 
the student who is seeking information of a more general 
character. 1 Such a series of accounts does more than afford 
precise and detailed evidence of the ways in which money 

1 The successive volumes of the History of the Drapers' Company, by 
the Rev. A. H. Johnson, which is based largely upon account books, and 
other financial records, throws much light upon the social and economic 
aspects of life in mediaeval London. 

D 



34 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

was gained and expended, of the commodities produced and 
consumed, of the general economic and social conditions 
under which trade was carried on. It will provide valuable 
information as to the character of individuals engaging in 
trade, as to the organisation of commerce, as to the connection 
between finance and politics. Of almost equal value from the 
point of view of the general historian are the account books of 
great mercantile families, and of large estates, where these 
constitute a series extending over a period covered by one or 
Their more generations. In addition to supplying details of domestic 
uses. YUe which would otherwise have escaped our notice, they help 

us to trace in a particular locality the working of those economic 
factors which effect so profoundly the prosperity of a people. 
From them we learn the kind of food that was eaten, the kind 
of clothes that were worn, the manner in which the domestic 
economy was organised. We can also trace the causes of the 
gradual decline in prosperity of one district, and follow through 
years its slow decay ; we can observe the rise of another 
district to affluence and importance, and note the changes 
which come over society through the impoverishment of the 
landlords and the advantages gradually acquired by the labour- 
ing population in the economic struggle for existence. 1 Such are 
some of the topics upon which a series of accounts, whether 
of a family or of an estate, may be expected to furnish in- 
formation. I need hardly insist further on their importance : 
for you will see that without them it is almost impossible to 
write the history of the economic and social progress of any 
country. Much material of this kind must exist in India 
to-day in the archive rooms of the older families ; and a most 
fruitful source of information thus lies ready to the hand of a 
future investigator. It is much to be hoped that some 
examples of such series of accounts may be published and thus 
be placed at the disposal of those interested in the history 

1 R. H. Tawnay's book on The Agrarian Problem in the XVIth 
Century, and Davenport's monograph on The Economic Development of 
a Norfolk Manor, are excellent examples of the employment of evidence 
of this kind. 



NON-OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 35 

of India ; for until this is done, it will be impossible to in- 
vestigate in any thorough fashion the social and economic 
changes which have come over the country in the course of 
centuries. 

There is, however, one caution which must be observed A caution, 
when accounts are being employed as sources of historical 
evidence. Most ancient statisticians, Indian as well as 
European, were bitten with a craze for round numbers, 
especially when they conceived that the honour of a dynasty, 
of a family, of an estate, was in any way concerned. Par- 
ticularly when we are dealing with summary statements, not 
itemised, must we be on our guard against a tendency to 
exaggeration in the total. One of the most flagrant examples 
of this may be found in the vast revenues assigned to the 
Mughal Emperors by writers connected with the court. Any 
one who has examined in detail the figures quoted in the 
Am Akbari 1 or in the Storia do Mogor 2 cannot fail to be 
convinced that the greatest over-statements have crept in. 
To some extent, perhaps, this may be explained by the desire 
to show what the state of affairs would have been if every one 
had been wholly disinterested in collecting the taxes and 
wholly altruistic in paying them. The fact however remains, 
that the figures as they stand are extremely misleading, and to 
argue from them is a matter necessitating the utmost caution. 

So much then for the Formal Non-official documents. We Informal 
now come to the much larger, and infinitely more varied, N £ n : , 
class of Informal Non-official documents. Among these the Docu- 
historian may generally expect to find the bulk of his material, merits. 
for they include all the more obvious, as distinguished from 
the more recondite, sources of evidence. 

The example with which I propose first to deal is the The 
Chronicle : that is to say, an account of events written in romcle « 
annalistic form, generally the work of a writer who lived 
about the time of the happenings he describes. I propose 
to deal with the chronicle in some detail ; first because it is 

1 Ayeen Akberi, ed. Jagadia Mukhopadhyaya, Part III. 

2 Storia do Mogor, ed. William Irvine, Part III, p. 413. 



36 THE HANDLING 01 HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

the type of historical material with which my own work has 
rendered me most familiar : secondly because, as I think, it 
affords an admirable training in critical method for the benefit 
of the student of history. A student who has learned how 
to handle chronicles, and how to make allowances for the 
bias of the author, for his imperfect information, for his 
blunders, for his obscurities of style, is in a fair way to have 
proved his competence to deal with other classes of historical 
evidence. 
Chronicles The authors of these chronicles generally dignify their 
®£ d . productions by the name of histories, but modern parlance 
refuses to recognise them as such for several reasons. It 
will be worth while to spend a moment in examining these 
reasons, which serve to illustrate the difference between 
ancient and modern methods of historical writing. In the 
first place the typical chronicler, unlike the typical historian, 
notes down his events just as they occur in course of time, 
without troubling to arrange them in any logical order. One 
event is only connected with the next because it happened 
soon afterwards, or, worse still, because the chronicler happened 
to hear of the second soon after he heard of the first. Instead 
of following the historian's plan of gathering together into a 
harmonious sequence the causes and the effects of great events 
and of showing how great movements arose from the gradual 
operation of many different forces, the chronicler generally puts 
all his material together in indiscriminate fashion, his sole test 
of arrangement being the year when such and such an event 
happened — and even this he will sometimes get wrong ! Let 
us take a purely imaginary example to point the difference 
between the chronicle and the history, and to give those who 
have never had occasion to deal with chronicles some idea of 
what such a piece of writing is like. The first entry on the 
page of a chronicle may deal with the accession of a king. 
The writer will probably supply a little information about 
the king, describe the coronation ceremony, and tell us whether 
he was good-looking or not. Many interesting details will be 
given, but just as we are settling ourselves to read an account 



NON-OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 37 

of the king's reign, the chronicler will put in a paragraph 
dealing with something quite irrelevant, perhaps a description 
of a miracle worked by some local saint about the time when 
the king was crowned. And instead of going on to tell us 
more about the miracles worked by the saint at other times, 
the following paragraph will perhaps deal with a famine which 
occurred in another country. To judge from the space allotted 
by the writer to each item, it would appear fairly certain that 
he looked upon them as being equally important. Now, a 
modern historian, when confronted with the same series of 
events, would deal with them in fashion very different. All 
available material about the king .and his reign would be 
collected and put together into consecutive narrative. If the 
famine were important, it would probably receive several 
pages all to itself in a chapter dealing with the working of 
economic and social forces during the period. The saint 
would probably not be mentioned unless his cult happened to 
possess a very definite bearing upon politics or upon religion. 
From this imaginary example it may be observed that between 
the chronicle and the history there are two main differences, 
one connected with method and the other with matter. First, 
the chronicle confines itself to relating what happened, while 
the history explains the causes of the happening and the effects 
of it. Secondly, the chronicle is undiscriminating, while the 
history is selective. 

From the foregoing, you will easily realise that the principal 
disadvantage of the chronicle, when considered as a source 
of historical evidence, is its lack of proportion. Every one 
who has read much modern historical writing will know how 
extremely difficult most men find it to distinguish between 
information which is essential, information which is supple- 
mentary, and information which is irrelevant. But the old 
chroniclers entirely failed to realise that the distinction was 
worth making. In consequence, they have preserved a large 
amount of unessential information, at the cost of omitting 
many things which we need to know if we are to understand 
fully the matters they are relating. But there is a further 



38 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

reason for this lack of due proportion. Most chroniclers fall 
victims to the common temptation of describing at great length 
any event, however unimportant, concerning which they 
imagined themselves to be in possession of information not 
generally current ; while they push into the background 
the most important events of the time, if these happen to have 
taken place in some other locality, or if no interesting details 
about them were immediately accessible. Two very striking 
examples which my own recent work has brought home to 
me will serve to illustrate this weakness. Let any one who 
reads the Humayun Nama compare the space which the 
estimable Gulbadan Begam devotes to the marriage festivities 
of Hindal Mirza 1 with the two lines in which she describes 
the advance of Shir Shah from Behar, 2 and let the reader 
then reflect upon the relative importance, even at the time, of 
the two events. Now the Begam was a wise and judicious 
lady, and when the work of her pen is marred by defects 
of this sort, we may well be prepared for far worse things in 
the case of inferior minds. The empty-headed Ananda 
Ranga Pillai, perhaps a typical example of a prolix and tire 
some chronicler, spends upon the visit of Mafauz Khan to 
Pondicherry in 1747, 3 ten times the space he devotes to the 
all-important quarrel between Dupleix and La Bourdonnais. 4 
Defects of The first disadvantage, then, of the chronicle as a source 
*h e of historical evidence is its failure to discriminate between 

* the trivial and the important. The second disadvantage is 
really a consequence of the particular quality which gives 
a chronicle its chief value — that which may be termed, for 
want of a better expression, its isolation. For the importance 
, of the chronicle as historical material lies principally in this : 
the sources from which its information was derived, whether 
the written or the spoken word, have perished, so that without 

1 Humayun Nama, ed. Beveridge (Oriental Translation Fund), p. 
126 seq. 

2 Ibid., p. 140. 

3 The Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, Dubash to Dupleix, vol. Ill, 
p. 323 

* Ibid., p. 39. 



NON-OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 39 

the interposition of the chronicler, the information would be 
lost beyond all hope of recovery. This, of course, places the 
chronicler in a position of great advantage. The mere fact 
that the chronicle is based upon information which we do not 
possess makes it extremely difficult to check any statements 
which the writer may choose to put forward. Although we 
can often make a shrewd guess at the source whence his 
information was derived, we can never be certain of it : his 
statements may rest upon personal experience, reliable testi- 
mony, or wildest rumour. Therefore, it follows that nothing 
can be taken for granted ; but each separate piece of informa- 
tion must be treated as something to be scrutinised by itself, 
to be accepted or rejected on its own merits. This is one of 
the most important cautions to be borne in mind when 
chronicles are being employed as sources of historical evidence. 
Among other things, it serves to explain the statement, which 
at first sight seems paradoxical, that a stupid chronicler is 
often more valuable than a clever one. Writers both clever 
and stupid, being but human, have private likes and dislikes, 
so that the possibility of personal bias can never be overlooked. 
But setting this consideration aside for the moment, it remains 
broadly true to say that the unintelligent man generally puts 
an event into writing much in the form in which it came under 
his notice, while the clever man is prone to comment upon it, 
to add information of his own, and then to serve up the resulting 
composition in such a manner as to make it appear that all 
the ingredients were derived from a single source. 1 Hence, 
the historian who is employing as his guide an unintelligent 
chronicler can generally be much more certain of the reliability 
of his information ; particularly if the chronicler, as not 
infrequently happens, makes it quite clear that he did not 
well understand the matters with which he was dealing. In 
the case of a clever and painstaking chronicler, on the other 
hand, the historian can never be quite sure to what extent 

1 Cf. my paper on St. Alban in Legend and History in the Bulletin 
of the Departments of History and Economics^ Queen's University, Canada, 
1913. 



40 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

the personality of the writer interposes as a barrier between 
the reader and the information of which he is in search. And 
that is why any one who has practical experience of such matters 
would far rather rely upon a plain, somewhat matter-of-fact 
writer like Firishta than upon a really brilliant writer like 
Abu'l Fazl Allami. The next consideration is the candour 
and honesty of the writer. Is he a partisan ? If so, he will 
suppress some facts which make against his side, and will 
represent other facts as though they showed his party to be in 
the right. But in doing so he will probably betray himself 
and so put us on our guard against accepting all his facts in 
the guise in which he puts them forward. On the other hand, 
if he shows no sign of bias in one direction or another, his 
opinions upon disputed points may be accepted as useful 
evidence. We may perhaps sum up the above considerations 
by the use of a homely metaphor. It is hardly too much to 
say that an impartial and simple-minded writer is like a 
pane of clear glass, which allows the light of information, 
whether good or bad, to arrive at the modern historian almost 
without interference, while the philosophical or partisan 
chronicler is like a pane of stained glass, which makes the light 
look much more beautiful by throwing it into all kinds of varied 
and interesting patterns, but alters it essentially in its passage. 
So much for the glass ; but what of the light which passes 
through it ? 
The value If we knew all the circumstances connected with the writing 
°* . of a given chronicle, it would be a comparatively simple matter 
cler's to determine its value as a source of historical evidence. The 
infor- difficulty is, of course, that we do not possess the necessary 
information ; so that we have to arrive at a conclusion upon 
insufficient premises, as a rule based principally upon the 
chronicle itself, supplemented, perhaps, by a little information 
concerning the personality of the chronicler. Generally, we 
have the text, and very little else, to guide us. Now, when we 
come to consider the reliability of the writer's statements, it 
is necessary to bear in mind what has already been said as 
to the desirability of scrutinising each statement separately. 



NON-OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 41 

Not even the best chronicle is equally good in all its parts. 
About some events the writer may have been exceptionally 
well informed ; he may have talked to people who took part 
in them, or he may even have taken part in them himself. 
With regard to other events, however, his testimony will be 
distinctly inferior in value ; he may have heard of them only at 
third or fourth hand, and his information may be in large 
degree unreliable. Distance in space or in time often played a 
considerable part in the perversion of truth. In days when 
news travelled with much greater difficulty than is the case at 
present, it was a justifiable presumption that the farther a man 
was removed from the spot where or from the time when any 
particular event took place, the less likely was he to know 
anything reliable concerning it. This presumption remains 
generally, though not universally, true in the case of the writers 
of chronicles. The farther the writer lived from the scene of 
the events he describes, the greater is the probability that he 
had nothing better to rely upon than current gossip ; and 
gossip, if it travels far, loses so little in the telling that it 
becomes almost unrecognisable. Also, the longer the interval 
of time separating the chronicler from that about which he 
writes, the greater the probability that the information is not 
really his own, but is derived from a source used more or less 
intelligently, a source which is neither authenticated nor 
discredited by the accuracy or inaccuracy of other portions of 
the chronicle. An example which may serve to illustrate this 
is supplied by Manucci's Storia do Mogor. Because Manucci 
is an important source of evidence for the reign of Aurangzib 
it must not be assumed that what he says about the earlier 
Mughal emperors possesses any value whatsoever. 1 In point 
of fact, his information upon this topic is strikingly misleading, 
even in the case of a monarch so recent as Akbar. Were it not 
for the name, it would be impossible to recognise the most 
brilliant of the Mughals in Manucci's absurd Don Juan-like 
figure, the hero of scandalous adventures, who pursues his 
amours unremittingly to the detriment of his affairs of state. 
1 Storia do Mogor, Part I, pp. 110-154. 



42 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

In the case of a contemporary writer, however, the matter 
is much simplified. From the mere way in which the writer 
tells his story, it is generally possible to discover whether he is 
relying upon hearsay, or whether he is in possession of informa- 
tion derived from a reliable source. If the account is full, 
picturesque, and precise in detail, it is generally safe to conclude 
that he has come into contact with information of some value. 
On the other hand, if he confines himself to a bald statement of 
facts, telling his story without gusto, giving few details of an 
intimate character, and displaying no particular interest in 
what he is saying, we may be fairly certain that he has at his 
disposal only such information as he expects to be in the 
possession of a well-informed reader. Take, for example, the 
account which Al-Baihaki gives of Sultan Mas'ud's drinking 
party. 1 

Ocular " After their departure, the Amir said to Abdu-r Razzak : ' What 

testimony sa y you, shall we drink a little wine ? ' He replied : ' When can we 
and bald better drink than on such a day as this, when my lord is happy, and 
narrative. m y j or( j> g gon k as attained his wish, and departed with the minister and 
officers ; especially after eating such a dinner as this ? ' The Amir 
said, ' Let us commence without ceremony, for we have come into the 
country, and we will drink in the Firozi Garden.' Accordingly much 
wine was brought immediately from the Pavilion into the garden, and 
fifty goblets and flagons were placed in the middle of a small tent. The 
goblets were sent round, and the Amir said : ' Let us keep fair measure, 
and fill the cups evenly, in order that there may be no unfairness.' 
Each goblet contained half a man. They began to get jolly, and the 
minstrels sang. Bu-1 Hasan drank five goblets, his head was affected 
at the sixth, he lost his senses at the seventh, and began to vomit at 
the eighth, when the servants carried him off. Bu-1 Ala, the physician, 
dropped his head at the fifth cup, and he also was carried off. Khalil 
Daud drank ten ; Siyabiruz nine ; and both were borne away to the 
Hill of Dailaman. Bu Na'im drank twelve, and ran off. Daud Maimandi 
fell down drunk, and the singers and buffoons all rolled off tipsy, when 
the Sultan and Khawaj' Abdu-r Razzak alone remained. When the 
Khwaja had drunk eighteen cups, he made his obeisance and prepared 
to go, saying to the Amir, ' If you give your slave any more, he will 
lose his respect for your majesty, as well as his own wits.' The Amir 
laughed and gave him leave to go ; when he got up and departed in a 

1 Elliot and Dowson. History of India, II, p. 245. 



NON-OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 43 

most respectful manner. After this, the Amir kept on drinking and 
enjoying himself. He drank twenty-seven full gobleta of half a man 
each. He then arose, called for a basin of water and his praying carpet, 
washed his face, and read the midday prayers as well as the afternoon 
ones, and so acquitted himself, that you would have said he had not 
drunk a single cup." 

Even without the express statement of the writer's presence 
at the scene, which is made immediately afterwards, we should 
have known that the genial Abul Fazl possessed information 
of no ordinary kind. A description at once so vivid and so 
detailed could not have been penned except from the testimony 
of an eye-witness. 

Compare this, for example, with Gulbadan Begam's account 
of her father's greatest military achievement : — 

" On Friday, Rajab 8th, 932 H. (Babur) arrayed battle against 
Sultan Ibrahim, son of Sultan Sikander, son of Bahlul Lodi. By God's 
grace he was victorious, and Sultan Ibrahim was killed in the fight. 
His victory was won purely by the Divine grace, for Sultan Ibrahim 
had a lak and 80,000 horse, and as many as 1500 head of fierce elephants ; 
while his Majesty's army with the traders, and good and bad, was 12,000 
persons, and he had at the outside 6000 or 7000 serviceable men." x 

The fact that the event first described was of no importance, 
while the second was the beginning of a new epoch in the 
history of Hindustan, only makes the difference in the descrip- 
tions more striking. It is unnecessary to spend further space 
on pointing the contrast between the account of a trivial scene 
by an eye-witness, and the account of a landmark in history 
by one who had no special knowledge to impart. 

Perhaps next in importance among the considerations which The im- 

determine the value of a chronicle as a source of historical Prance 
• 1 . ipt • -n ... of style, 

evidence, is the style of the writer. Irom our point of view, 

the style of a chronicle depends upon two factors. First, 

does the author write lucidly ? Secondly, does he write with 

precision ? The former is rather a question of the language, 

the latter, one of the mind, of the writer. And in order that 

a chronicle shall be of the highest service as historical material, 

1 Eumdyun Ndma, p. 94. 



U THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

it must not only be so written that the meaning of the author 
is clearly apparent from the words he uses, but, in addition, 
it must contain precise statements, not vague generalisations. 
Probably it is true to say that very few chronicles entirely 
satisfy these conditions. So far as my own experience may be 
trusted, oriental writers are rather more inclined to ignore the 
first requisite than the second. The almost universal employ- 
ment of stately and high-flown language, with the object of 
impressing the reader, often makes the exact meaning of the 
writer very obscure. In the writers of mediaeval Europe the 
weaknesses would seem to be almost equally balanced. The 
kind of Latin they used was too flexible, the meaning of the 
words changed too often, to allow us to be certain that we are 
attaching to his phrases the precise meaning which the writer 
himself intended them to bear. Also the European chroniclers, 
while they too often share with Oriental chroniclers a contempt 
for mere facts and dates, are in addition frequently too lazy 
to make a precise statement when they think that a resounding 
phrase from Cicero, or, worse still, from Lactantius, will 
exhibit their learning or conceal their ignorance. 
Accuracy The final demand made by the historian from the chronicler 
in chroni- j s accuracy. The reason why this demand is placed last 
instead of first may require some explanation. Accuracy, as 
applied to chronicles, is a relative term ; perhaps, indeed, 
the word carefulness would better express my meaning. 
Every chronicler of whom I have heard, to say nothing of every 
chronicler whose work I have inspected, makes certain mistakes, 
sometimes upon questions of fact, more often upon questions 
of chronology. There are, however, reasonable limits to this 
inaccuracy ; and when the chronicler makes a definite state- 
ment, which proves on examination to be entirely baseless, the 
investigator has some right to grumble. Mistakes of this 
kind are generally to be ascribed to carelessness of some sort ; 
the common plan employed by chroniclers of jotting down 
events upon separate slips of paper before working the narrative 
up into its final form made it very easy to enter an event under 
a year to which it did not belong. In consequence, the next 



NON-OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 45 

writer who comes along, not content with copying the mistake, 
will not improbably invent some fanciful reason to explain 
why the event took place at such an unexpected time. The 
third writer perhaps confirms the error by embodying both 
mistake and imaginary explanation in his own narrative. 1 
You will easily see, from this consideration alone, the necessity 
for the precaution, on which so much stress has been laid, of 
criticising with the utmost care every statement made by a 
chronicler, no matter how reliable may be other parts of his 
narrative. 

I now pass on to the second of the principal types of Memoirs. 
Informal Non-official documents, namely, Memoirs. These 
may be divided for convenience into three kinds, each of which 
must be examined briefly. The first kind consists of itineraries 
and travellers' narratives. Material of this character presents 
features of particular interest to the historian, although it 
requires as careful handling as any other kind. Its great Trayel- 
value as evidence lies in the fact that the traveller, being gener- J^| eg 
ally a foreigner, takes notice of things which a native of the 
country would pass over as too obvious and too familiar to be 
described ; and these are sometimes just the things about which 
the modern historian stands most in need of information. This 
is particularly likely to be the case where the traveller belongs 
to a type of civilisation entirely different from that of the 
people among whom he is sojourning. He makes his observa- 
tions from a point of view very far removed from that of the 
native writers, and his account is therefore of great assistance 
to subsequent investigators, who desire to arrive at an unbiassed 
conclusion concerning an individual, a dynasty, or a nation. 
It is unnecessary to insist upon the value of the narratives 
of such famous travellers as Hiuen Tsang, Marco Polo, and 
ibn Batuta, whose names are household words to students. 
But travellers whose reputation as men of letters is not so 
great as that of the foregoing, often leave narratives which as 
historical material are of the highest value. Some of the 

1 There are some excellent examples of this type of error to be found 
in the materials employed by Abbot in his St. Thomas of Canterbury. 



46 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

Europeans who travelled through the realms of the " Great 
Mogul," have left such detailed accounts of what they saw and 
heard that it is almost impossible to study the period without 
referring to them at every turn, and this despite the existence 
of excellent contemporary historians of the country. Among 
the most important of these accounts may be mentioned those 
which have been left by Sir Thomas Roe, William Hawkins, 
Francois Bernier, and Nicolo Manucci. 1 But it is perhaps 
almost superfluous to say that travellers' narratives, like 
every other kind of material with which the historian has to 
deal, are subject to certain defects peculiar to themselves, 
necessitating the observance of special precautions for their 
Their proper employment. In the first place the traveller, just 
defects, because of that detachment from his surroundings which gives 
his testimony such value, fails to understand much of what he 
sees, so that his account, even where it is substantially accurate, 
is liable to mislead the reader. Secondly, in collecting his 
information, he is naturally driven to rely far too much upon 
mere gossip, and is to some extent at the mercy of his 
informants. Nor are deliberate attempts to impose upon the 
credulity of the traveller at all uncommon. Much of what the 
priests of Memphis told Herodotus was probably intended to 
mislead him, and was certainly untrue ; but the " Father of 
History " has recorded it all in the most perfect good faith, 
to the mystification of posterity. Similarly, many of the 
stories so diligently collected by Nicolo Manucci concerning 
the history of the earlier Mughal emperors seem to have been 
pure bazaar gossip, with but the slenderest foundation in 
fact. 2 But there is a further point to be considered. The 
accounts left by travellers are but rarely in the form of a 
journal ; frequently they are written down in the old age of the 
wanderer, or at least, after an interval of many years. There is, 
therefore, ample scope both for the exercise of imagination in 

1 For those who desire a short concise account of these travellers 
and their work, E. F. Oaten's book, European Travellers in India, has 
much to recommend it. 

8 Sioria do Mogor, I, pp. 110-154, etc. 



NON-OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 47 

supplementing the defects of memory, and for the perpetration 
of blunders in all good faith. The clearness of early impressions 
has passed away, with the result that the details of one event 
may easily be confused with those of another, and an anecdote 
connected with some person or place is transferred to another 
person or place to which it has no reference. For such reasons 
as these, the inaccuracy of " travellers' tales " has become a 
by-word ; not perhaps undeservedly for the most part. It is 
therefore necessary to remember, that, valuable as these 
itineraries and log-books are to the historian, their use is to 
assist him in forming impressions rather than in supplying him 
with facts. They will give him a clearer idea of what the 
country looked like at a particular time : of what its rulers 
were like to see and to speak with : of what its inhabitants 
were like in their ordinary life. So long as we remember that 
the traveller is rather describing impressions than detailing 
facts, we shall not go far wrong in our handling of his evidence. 

The second class of Memoirs with which we have to deal Autobio- 
consists of Autobiographies, consisting generally of personal g ra P nies - 
recollections of great events, written by those whose fortune 
it was to be concerned in them. 1 These recollections are of 
particular value in that they frequently contain facts not 
otherwise obtainable concerning the forces which worked 
beneath the surface of events ; they tell the " secret history " 
of important crises ; they clear up much that would otherwise 
remain a mystery. But their employment as historical 
material calls for the exercise of the utmost caution. They are 
mostly biassed, despite their common parade of impartiality : 
they are generally designed to exhibit the virtues of the writer 
and expose the vices of his opponents : they are often dis- 
ingenuous, distorting facts and imputing motives in a manner 
calculated to serve the particular end for which they are 
designed. 

Sometimes, indeed, these memoirs are nothing but special 
pleading, requiring as careful examination as the speech of a 

1 Such, for example, as the Memoires of Cardinal de Retz ; or the 
GedanJcen und Erinnerungen of Bismarck. 



48 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

Counsel for the Defence. Moreover, as they are generally 
written at the close of life, many years subsequent to the events 
they describe, they often contain serious errors of fact, due to 
the failing memory of the author. Some of the astonishing 
mistakes which have crept into such works as Clarendon's 
History of the Great Rebellion can only be explained by assuming 
that at the time when they were written the memories of the 
Beminis- authors were beginning to play them false. The last type of 
cences. Memoir consists of the recollections of those who were brought 
into contact with great events rather as spectators than as 
actors ; who were tolerated by prominent men rather than 
received by them as equals. Memoirs of this kind were often 
written frankly for the amusement of the author, for the enter- 
tainment of the reader, or for both. In consequence, they 
have less of the bias, as well as of the bitterness, which are 
so markedly characteristic of the writings of greater men. 
On the other hand, they often possess a form of bias peculiar 
to themselves. They are too prone to lavish undeserved 
praise upon the particular person or group of persons most 
intimately known to the author. The memoirs of such men 
as Al Baihaki and Pepys, with their gossipping anecdotes of 
places and of persons, are often delightful reading ; but as 
historical material are generally of the second rank. Sometimes, 
indeed, as is the case with Wilhelm Busch's Recollections of 
Bismarck, there is an intimate vein of reminiscence which 
actually throws new light upon the character and personality 
of a prominent personage. Generally speaking, however, 
memoirs of this type are valuable principally for their illus- 
trations of the manners and customs of contemporary society, 
for the snatches of conversation or the occasional anecdote 
which exhibits some famous personage in an unusual light, 
and for the minute particulars of dress, habit, and personal 
mannerism which so often escape the notice of writers possessing 
a higher sense of their own importance. 
Corre- I now pass on to the next class of Informal Non-official 

ence material — private correspondence. This is another extremely 

important source of historical evidence : the more so that 



NON-OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS 49 

much of what would now be accounted official correspondence 
was formerly regarded as the private correspondence of a 
particular official. It therefore happens that among the 
private papers of prominent historical personages, there will 
generally be found many documents dealing with public affairs 
of the highest importance ; and it is impossible to examine 
the family archives of any of the older English families without 
coming upon many papers which ought, strictly speaking, 
to be housed in the Public Record Office. However, putting 
this consideration on one side, private correspondence, in the 
accepted sense of the term, presents features of great interest 
to the historian. Its principal function is to furnish details, 
of a kind not otherwise available, of the conditions of social life 
prevailing at the time. A mass of private letters will fre- 
quently throw a vivid light upon the character of existence in a 
particular locality ; and while such letters rarely contain 
references to events of first-rate importance, they frequently 
supply information which serves to exhibit such events in their 
true proportion. 1 It is difficult to exaggerate the debt owed 
by modern historians to such collections of correspondence as 
that which passed between members of the Paston family in 
fifteenth-century England. From these letters there can be 
gathered many particulars concerning the standards of educa- 
tion, morality, and refinement current among particular 
classes of society, of a kind such as are obtainable from no other 
source of historical evidence whatever. Further, since they are 
generally intended for the eye of relations or of intimate friends, 
these letters are as a rule written both simply and candidly. 
From the point of view of the historian, however, private corre- 
spondence suffers from two principal defects. First, the informa- 
tion contained in the letters is almost necessarily imperfect ; 
except where strictly local and strictly personal matters are 
concerned, the facts are often the reverse of reliable. The 
wildest rumours are reported, and the exaggerations so typical 
of local gossip frequently make their appearance. The second 

1 Among the classical examples of this type of material may be 
mentioned the Letters of Cicero and the Letters of Erasmus. 

E 



50 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

difficulty is this : private correspondence is generally very 
diffuse in character. A vast deal of chaff has to be sifted by the 
historian in order that a little good grain may be discovered. 
By a singular fatalit}-, it is often the correspondence of the least 
important people that has been preserved to us in the most 
perfect condition. There are, fortunately, many exceptions 
to this statement, but on the whole, it is surprising how fre- 
quently the historian finds himself compelled to wade through 
bundle after bundle of old letters, without possessing the 
smallest desire to know anything at all about the people who 
wrote them or the people who read them, either because he has 
reason to believe that some mention is made of other persons 
in whom he is interested, or because he desires to gain a clearer 
and more definite impression of social life in general or of the 
conditions of existence in a particular locality. 

This is the last of the kinds of historical material which we 
set ourselves to examine ; and although the system of classi- 
fication which I have adopted cannot claim to be exhaustive, 
I think it will be found that all the more important species of 
historical material fall into place under one or other of these 
summary headings. It is to be hoped that my audience now 
possesses a clearer idea of some of the lines along which the 
modern historian must work, and a more definite impression 
that the writing of history, like most other technical employ- 
ments, is not quite the simple affair which at first sight it 
appears to be. 



LECTURE III 

Pitfalls in the Path of the Historian 



PITFALLS IN THE PATH OF THE HISTORIAN 

1. The Historian himself. 

(a) Ancient and Modern conceptions of his function — 

the Dangers attending the Modern employment of 
the Theoretical Element. 

(b) Difficulty of preserving the Impartial Attitude of Mind. 

(c) Difficulty of separating the Provinces of Theory and 

Fact. 

2. The Marshalling of his Evidence. 

(a) Difficulty of obtaining adequate Quantity of Evidence. 

(b) Difficulty of weighing Evidence when obtained. 

3. The presentation of his Conclusions. 

(a) Discrimination of Essential and Non-essential Elements. 
(6) Style. 



c 



LECTUEE III 

In the two previous lectures, which dealt with the classification 
and the handling of the different kinds of historical material, 
we examined in some little detail the stuff with which the 
historian has to work, gaining by the way, I hope, a more 
adequate conception of the varied, as well as the complicated, 
nature of that material. Each particular species, as we noticed, 
possesses certain advantages and certain drawbacks when 
considered from the point of view of the evidence it can 
furnish. From one source, we concluded, the historian must 
be content to draw a general, if vivid, impression of the 
characteristics presented by social life in a particular epoch : 
from another, he may learn the arguments by which a luckless 
and discredited minister strove to justify himself in the eyes 
f a world which concerns itself less with intentions than with | 
achievements : from yet a third, he may confidently expect 
to discover authentic details of the most intimate affairs of 
state. But whatever may chance to be the particular kind 
of information of which the historian is in search, whatever 
may be the species of material upon which he is working, his 
critical faculties must ever be on the alert. He must walk 
delicately, he must employ the utmost caution, he must 
refrain from jumping to conclusions. Step by step the firm 
road which he is building for the benefit of others must be 
tested and retested, until there remains no room for doubt that 
the foundation and superstructure are alike solid and unassail- 
able. Yet with all his caution, it is idle to suppose that he 
can escape falling into error. The historian possesses, indeed, 
from the very nature of his work, a better excuse for error 

53 



54 THE HANDLING OP HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

than many of his fellow labourers in other departments of 
knowledge, for with whatever care he works, he has no means 
of testing the final results of his investigation. He has no 
laboratory in which he can prove by actual observation the 
adequacy or inadequacy of the explanations he frames to 
The ^ account for the course taken by past events. He can conduct 
difficult S no ex P ei 'i mente : tne phenomena he investigates cannot be 
ties. made to repeat themselves at his will until their mere repetition 

suffices to force upon his mind conclusions from which there 
is no escape. The whole value of his work therefore depends 
upon the elimination of error during the process by which he 
arrives at his results ; for when that result has once been 
achieved, the presence of error can but rarely be detected, 
owing to the absence of any test by which the conclusion 
of the whole matter may be tried. It is therefore worth 
spending some time in considering some of the commonest 
pitfalls which surround the path of the historian, and this 
for two reasons : first, that the difficulties of that path may 
be perceived by those who are not called upon to follow it, 
and secondly, that those of us whose business it is to engage 
in historical research may, by recounting the mistakes of 
others, chance to avoid some of the more obvious types of 
error so far as our own work is concerned. 
Pitfalls in The pitfalls among which the historian is called upon to 
his path, thread his path are of three principal kinds. They may be 
treated very conveniently in tripartite form, according as 
they refer more particularly to the investigator himself, to 
the marshalling of his evidence, or to the manner in which he 
proceeds to his conclusions. 
The First, as regards the historian himself. We have already 

historian gained some notion of the exacting nature of the demands 
made upon him by the newer conceptions of historical writing ; 
but in order to make our ideas more definite, we may perhaps 
glance once more at the state of affairs which now exists no 
longer. In the old days, a historian was expected to relate 
facts, not to discover explanations of their significance. There 
was, indeed, a notion that he was responsible for the accuracy 



PITFALLS IN THE PATH OF THE HISTORIAN 55 

of his facts, but he certainly stood in a privileged position in 

regard to them. He was expected to treat of events which 

he had himself witnessed, or of which he had heard from those 

possessing peculiarly intimate knowledge. So that while what 

was primarily expected from the historian was an accurate 

account of events, preferably of exciting events, there was 

very little prejudice against a personal interpretation of them, 

which was regarded as something merely incidental. Many 

of the older writers took full advantage of this attitude on the 

part of their public, " making " — to employ Robert Louis 

Stevenson's phrase — " no charge for the colouring." Perhaps 

the most striking instance is that supplied by the curious series 

of changes which befell the first book of Froissart's Chronicle. 

This work, one of the most vivid pieces of descriptive writing 

produced by mediaeval Europe, treats principally of the wars 

waged between the French and the English during the latter 

half of the fourteenth century. When the first version was 

written, Froissart was looking for favour from the court of 

the third Edward — nor was he disappointed. His work, as 

might have been expected, was strongly English in sympathy. 

Every conflict between the two nations is treated from the 

English point of view, and it is the deeds of English knights 

that are principally singled out for praise. But by the time 

the Second Book of the Chronicle was completed, a change 

had come over the circumstances of the author. His English 

friends were dead, his English gold had been spent, and he 

was living at the court of a noble who sided with the French. 

The Second and Third Books, accordingly, were French in 

sympathy, and Froissart, with a fine sense of consistency, 

revised the First Book in order to bring it into harmony with 

the other two. Incidents which had once redounded to the 

credit of the English were now depicted from the opposite 

point of view ; English defeats were converted into French 

victories, and Gallic knighthood was extolled as the flower 

of Christian chivalry. Finally, towards the very end of his 

life, Froissart revisited England, and being so fortunate as to 

discover, among many strangers, a few old friends, felt his 



56 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

heart warm once more towards the nation which had received 
him so favourably in the days of his youth. Accordingly, p, 
third edition of the First Book was completed, in which die 
sympathies of the author were once more enlisted on the side 
of the English. There are some doubts, indeed, as to whether 
this third redaction of the First Book ever came into circula- 
tion ; but it certainly exists in manuscript in the Vatican 
Library. It is not so uncompromisingly English in tone as 
was the first version of all, for an attempt is made to give the 
French point of view from time to time. But the change 
from the second, the French version, is extremely marked ; 
the English are once more heroes of the narrative. It would 
be interesting to know whether Froissart would have made 
any more alterations if suitable occasion had offered ; but 
as he died quite soon after completing his third version, he 
had no opportunity of carrying matters further. Perhaps 
the most remarkable feature of the whole incident is this : 
no one thought any the worse of Froissart, either as a man or 
as an historian, for thus trimming his sails to suit the wind. 
Think for a moment what would be said of a Sorel, a Delbriick, 
or a Ferrero who should suddenly alter his opinions in such 
a fashion ! The explanation lies, of course, at the root of 
what I have throughout emphasised as the distinction between 
the ancient and the modern conceptions of the historian's 
function. When one is dealing with events pure and simple, 
it is an easy matter to alter the whole tone of one's narrative ; 
it is merely a question of telling the story from the other side. 
The But with the modern historian, the case is different. He may 

function not adopt a professedly partisan attitude ; the utmost he can 
in modern ^° * s to P resent n ^ s conclusions in such shape that the reader's 
historical judgment upon them follows a particular course. As he is 
writing, expected not merely to relate facts, but also to account for 
them, he must necessarily discover for himself a carefully- 
reasoned theory, to explain the course taken by events. This 
theory constitutes as it were the backbone of his narrative, 
serves to retain each fact in its appointed place in an articulate 
whole, and determines absolutely the shape assumed by the 



PITFALLS IN THE PATH OF THE HISTOKIAN 57 

period as he conceives of it. It follows, therefore, that any 
transference of the sympathies of a modern historian from one 
side to the other would, if carried into his narrative, entail 
far more than a fresh version of events ; it would mean an 
entire recasting of the most important thing in his work, the 
theory which gives unity and coherence to the whole, which 
represents the historian's individual contribution to the 
interpretation of history. 

I have spent so much space in thus contrasting the ancient 
and modern types of historical writing "because I wish to 
emphasise the important and characteristic part played by 
theory in the work of the modern historian. It is not sufficient, 
let me repeat, for the historian to inform the reader that 
something happened : he must tell him why it happened, 
and perhaps, why some other thing did not happen. He 
must be prepared to show the connection between a series of 
facts which at first sight appear independent of one another : 
he must trace the development of movements extending 
through centuries of time : he must explain how each separate 
event in these movements falls into place in its relation to the 
whole. Now you will readily understand that it is in the 
presence of the connecting links which the historian must 
supply, of this carefully reasoned theory which serves to knit 
separate facts into an ordered, intelligible scheme of things, 
that the risk of error really lies. While its proper employment Dangers 
is the most valuable, as it is the most difficult, portion of attending 
the historian's work, yet he must never allow himself to forget pioyment. 
that it proceeds from his own mind ; it is something personal 
to himself, differing absolutely from the material out of which 
it is constructed. While the material can be discovered, the 
theory must be created. Therefore at every moment the 
historian must remember that, however careful he may have 
been to suppress his personal prejudices, and to approach his 
problem with an open mind, he can never be certain that his 
theory is entirely warranted by the facts. He is, then, on 
the horns of a dilemma. He cannot avoid employing this 
element of theory as the cement which binds his isolated facts, 



5S THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

by themselves so meaningless, into an intelligible and ordered 
structure ; yet for aught he can tell, the cement may be 
faulty through the omission of some obscure but essential 
ingredient. It then becomes a source of weakness rather than 
of strength, a disintegrating and not a unifying influence. 
There is, however, one precaution which can always be taken 
for the safeguarding of historic truth. The reader must be 
left free to discover for himself, if he can, a better interpre- 
tation of the facts than that which is propounded to him by 
the historian, who must, indeed, make it his aim to observe 
the cardinal distinction between the two provinces of his work : 
between the facts, as they have been ascertained, and their 
interpretation, as it has been formulated. 
Bias. In the process of evolving his theory, the historian must, 

of course, keep his mind free from all conscious bias. This of 
itself is no easy task, when he finds himself touching upon any 
of the great questions upon which men are slowly agreeing to 
differ. It is a commonplace to say that the opinions of the 
average man are in great measure the product of early training 
and subsequent environment ; and it is well known that 
prejudices, however irrational, acquired in childhood are the 
hardest things in the world to overcome. This is particularly 
the case with all questions of a religious nature. It is almost 
impossible for the historian to escape an aversion from, or a 
predilection for, that particular type of creed in which he 
was born and bred. And it is hardly necessary to remind you 
that of all the influences which tend most readily to the per- 
version of historic truth, odium tlieologicum is the most active 
and the most pernicious. As an illustration of this, it is only 
necessary to consider the different pictures presented by Hindu 
and Muhammedan writers respectively of the personality and 
achievements of such a figure as Mahmud Batshikan. To the 
one, he is the embodiment of all vice, to the other, the in- 
carnation of every possible virtue. Or take Badaoni's account 
of the cold-blooded murder of that inoffensive, scholarly 
gentleman Mulla Ahmad — the pious and respected editor of 
the Tarikh-i-Alfi— by a private enemy in 996 A,H. 



PITFALLS IN THE PATH OF THE HISTORIAN 59 

"During this month (Safar) Mirza Faulad Birlas persuaded the 
heretic Mulla Ahmad, who was always openly reviling the first Khalifs, 
to leave his own house at midnight under some pretence, and then 
assassinated him. The chronograms of which event are, ' Bravo ! 
Faulad's stiletto ! ' and ' Hellish hog ! 3 and indeed when I saw that dog 
in the agonies of death, I observed his countenance to be exactly like 
that of a hog : others also observed the same May G'od protect me 
from such a dreadful fate ! " 

" Mirza Faulad was bound alive to the leg of an elephant in the 
city of Lahore, and thus attained martyrdom." 



This sort of thing is the inevitable result of adopting a 
partisan attitude in debatable matters. But unfortunately, 
the preservation of the properly judicial attitude requires far 
more than the preliminary determination to approach hotly- 
discussed problems with an open mind. Even when the 
historian has convinced himself of the success of his deliberate 
attempt to attain an impartial outlook, he dare not relax his 
precautions. For all unconsciously, in the mere process of 
marshalling his evidence, he may acquire a strong partiality 
for one side or the other, so that he slips gradually into that 
partisan frame of mind that his business requires him to avoid. 
Every one of us has experienced something of the kind. In 
our reading, whether of the Iliad or of the latest novel, we 
range ourselves as Greeks or as Trojans without being able to 
give any satisfactory explanation of our attitude ; and we do 
scant justice either to the persons or to the causes that chance 
to conflict with those which, in some mysterious manner, claim 
our sympathy. There is only one way of escaping this partisan 
spirit, which, however excusable it may be, is fatal to historic 
truth. Directly the historian finds himself beginning to espouse 
one of two contending causes, to feel certain that he knows 
on which side justice lies, he must deliberately check the 
accuracy of his judgments. There is no other course open to 
him but to retrace his path step by step, to revise all his 
estimates of motive and his determinations of right and wrong, 
until he is convinced, either that his suspected partiality is 
really justified by the facts, or, which is much more likely to 



60 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

be the case, that it proceeds entirely from some hitherto 
unsuspected bias in his own mind. 
Two There are two further dangers against which the investi- 

f i Ult ^ er gator of historical problems must ever be on his guard, and 
each demands a certain amount of attention. The first is 
this. The historian must beware lest he become obsessed by 
any theory, however original and illuminating, to such a 
degree that he regards it as more important than the facts 
it is designed to explain ; so that, indeed, he selects his facts 
to illustrate his theory rather than employs his theory to 
interpret his facts. At first sight, perhaps, this would seem 
to be an error of so extravagant a type that it is rarely to be 
found ; but as a matter of experience, nothing is easier than 
to cite the names of illustrious writers whose work has suffered 
through it. Sir Henry Maine may be taken as a case in point. 
So learned a lawyer was he, that even his conception of the 
Universe might be said to be coloured by legal theory ; and 
among his many valuable contributions to historical juris- 
prudence — a study of which he was in some sort the pioneer — 
may be found certain conclusions which are more astonishing 
than useful. Those of you who have read his essay on Ancient 
Law will remember the naive surprise with which he hails 
the discovery of characteristic Roman legal institutions, such 
as patria potestas in all sorts of unlikely places. The truth 
is, of course, that he carried these institutions in his mind 
wherever he went, with the natural result that he was always 
discovering them in fresh connections. To employ a homely 
metaphor, it is very much as if a man were to tread in a pool 
of kerosene, and were to proceed to argue, from the odour every- 
where accompanying him, that oil is an essential ingredient in 
the composition of every piece of natural scenery. The instance 
selected may serve as an example, for it can easily be paralleled. 
It is a peculiarity of this type of error, indeed, that it exercises 
a marked attraction upon intellects of more than ordinary 
vigour. The more powerful, the more original, the mind of 
a given historian, the greater is the danger of his becoming 
the slave, rather than the master, of the theories he propounds 



PITFALLS IN THE PATH OF THE HISTORIAN 61 

with such force. This is not, of course, to deny that this 
pitfall counts among its victims many who cannot by any 
stretch of imagination be placed in the first flight of historians. 
Perhaps the most pernicious example is James Mill, whose 
History of British India stands unsurpassed for sheer un- 
scrupulousness in the manipulation, and even the manuf acture, 
of evidence in support of a preconceived theory. 

The next danger is not unlike this, but is even more 
insidious. The historian must beware of attaching himself 
so closely to his theory, that he cannot bring himself to revise 
it in the light of any fresh facts that may come under his 
notice. If he is not always ready to adapt his old theory 
to his new facts, he will end by adapting his new facts to his 
old theory ; and when confronted by the necessity of choosing 
between the two, he will prefer to stand by his theory and 
allow his facts to look after themselves. He is now so pos- 
sessed by his theory, so convinced of its unalterable truth, 
that he fails to see more than a single aspect of any given 
question. The disastrous consequences of this attitude may 
assume either one of two alternative forms. First, when the 
historian requires a fact which is not to hand for the purpose 
of rounding off a pet theory, he may proceed gaily on his way 
as if the fact were in truth at his disposal. An example will 
serve to illustrate this. James Mill, in his treatment of 
Warren Hastings, plainly started with the assumption that 
the Governor-General was guilty of the grossest peculation. 
This assumption seemed to require that Hastings should have 
derived pecuniary profit from the Rohilla War, from the 
treasure of the Oudh begams, and finally, that he should have 
returned home a wealthy man. Accordingly, sinister motives 
are imputed to him throughout the whole of his administration ; x 
and in the three matters mentioned above, the Rohilla War, 
the Oudh affair, and his private fortune, statements are calmly 
made for which there is not a shadow of foundation, simply in 
order that they may seem to buttress a theory as false as 

1 See particularly Book V, chapters 1-3 and 6-9 : Book VI, chapters 
1 and 2. 



62 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

themselves. 1 An example so flagrant as this cannot probably 
be explained save on the assumption that there existed a grave 
animus in the mind of the author ; but it is not hard to find 
instances where almost the same thing has been done in perfect 
good faith. The mistake arises, of course, from being so 
convinced of the truth of one's theory, that when the facts 
do not exactly fit, one assumes that it is with them, rather 
than with the theory, that the fault must lie. 

The second consequence, while less aggravated, is none 
the less extremely prejudicial to the cause of truth. Obsessed 
by his theory, the historian is only capable of realising the 
significance of such facts as serve to confirm it. Everything 
which can be made to fit in with his preconceived idea is eagerly 
seized upon and used ; while facts which are too stubborn 
to be bent into the shape required are ignored, generally because 
the historian simply fails to appreciate them. If we happen 
to be reading any one of the class of writers whom Robert 
Louis Stevenson has designated " good honest partisan his- 
torians," we cannot fail to observe that the author's bias is 
so pronounced that it has become almost instinctive. He 
cannot appreciate any fact which tells against the cause he 
is advocating, for the simple reason that its significance cannot 
penetrate the thick armour of prejudice which blunts his 
sensibilities in certain directions. And though the error in 
such cases might seem to be wilful, yet this pitfall is one which 
besets the path of every historian. Thrice blessed is he who 
does not occasionally flounder into it ! 

Against all these dangers to which the introduction of the 
theoretical element exposes the historian, an open mind is the 
only real safeguard, joined to a strong sense of the responsi- 
bility which attends those who seek after historic truth. It 
is a painful thing to revise a carefully constructed theory in 
the light of a single, apparently insignificant fact : to destroy 
the labour of weeks, or, it may be, of months, on account of 

1 That the whole investigation is carried on with a fine assumption 
of impartiality only increases, as Sir John Strachey has remarked, the 
seriousness of Mill's offence against historic truth. 



PITFALLS IN THE PATH OF THE HISTORIAN 63 

a chance discovery which has occupied perhaps a minute. It 
seems so easy to gloss over the inconvenient fact, and to turn 
once more to the elaboration of a favourite theoiy. The 
temptation is one which comes to every investigator, and if 
it is not fairly faced, it will often claim a victim. But the 
historian, like any one else who engages in research, comes 
gradually to learn that truth is the only legitimate end ; and 
that truth, when it is once attained, is the sufficient, if generally 
the sole, reward of the pursuer. 

I now pass on to the second of the three kinds of pitfalls The Mar- 
which threaten to engulf the historian — namely, those con- s ^} 1 ^ °f 
nected with the marshalling of his evidence. In the two 
previous lectures, we have entered into a brief discussion of 
the special difficulties connected with the different kinds of 
material from which this evidence is extracted. We now 
have to deal with cautions of a more general character. The 
first difficulty that the historian must endeavour to overcome 
is almost insuperable. He must strive to obtain all the 
evidence which bears upon the subject that he is investigating ; 
or at least he must take care that nothing essential escapes 
him. Unless this is done either his work will fall far short 
of truth, or at best, he will be confronted at a later stage with 
the painful dilemma we have just examined ; he will have either 
to remodel his theory in harmony with some essential piece 
of evidence which he has omitted to take into account, or else 
to harden his conscience and continue along the road he has 
previously marked out, ignoring or explaining away the 
inconvenient fact. From this it will be realised that the 
collection of evidence is an art of the utmost importance, and, 
unfortunately, an art for which no rules can be laid down. 
The only way to acquire it is through apprenticeship in the 
workshops of acknowledged masters of history. From them 
one learns to recognise, roughly, the kinds of evidence which 
ought to be available upon any given topic of study ; one 
learns where to look for such evidence, and how to recognise 
its value when it is found. But with all one's precautions, 
one can never be quite sure that the entire body of available 



64 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

evidence is to hand, and for that reason, as I have said before, 
it is an essential precaution that we should keep ourselves in 
such a frame of mind that we are capable of receiving and of 
utilising a new fact which is unexpectedly brought to our 
notice, even when that same fact renders worthless the labour 
of weeks by demonstrating the inadequacy of our carefully 
constructed theory. 

The second difficulty is that of arriving at the true value 
of the evidence when it has been collected. The process is 
somewhat as follows. 
The Having got his evidence together, the historian begins to 

evalu- sor t ft 0U £ # 1^ w [\\ f a ]i first of all into two broad divisions, 
evidence, primary and secondary ; that is to say, major sources, upon 
which he principally relies, and minor sources, which are used 
to supplement the major sources in points of detail. After 
this preliminary classification, there comes the most delicate 
task of all. His authorities are sure to contradict one another 
in certain points, and he must carefully weigh their evidence 
in order to discover where lies the truth. Generally it will be 
found that whenever major sources contradict one another, 
minor sources are most useful in settling the disputed point. 
This they commonly do by supplying some small detail which 
proves inconsistent with the truth of one story, and being 
itself of undoubted authenticity, compels the historian to 
choose the other story. Sometimes, however, it happens 
that minor evidence is not available ; and in this case, recourse 
must be had to the other means of settling the point in dispute. 
Now wherever the materials from which the conflicting 
evidence is taken are of different kinds, much help may be 
gained from a consideration of the particular strength and 
weakness of each kind of material, when examined in some 
such way as we examined it in the last two lectures. It will 
often be found that one of the conflicting stories is put out of 
court at once on the ground that the source from which it is 
derived is by its nature incompetent to furnish good evidence 
upon the particular point at issue. For example, if there is 
a conflict of evidence upon a question of chronology, and the 



PITFALLS IN THE PATH OF THE HISTORIAN 65 

date supplied by an official document is contradicted by a 
contemporary chronicler of the ordinary careless type, the 
statement of the chronicler may safely be disregarded, as 
being altogether inferior in weight to the evidence of the 
official document. But when the conflicting statements are 
both derived from materials of a similar type, and when at 
the same time there is no minor evidence to incline the scale 
to one side or the other, then the critical training of the 
historian is tried to the utmost. Each piece of evidence has 
to be tested separately. In the case of an official document, 
we have to ask whether it is genuine, whether it is an original 
or a copy, whether a clerical error can have crept in. In the 
case of a non-official document, there is a similar series of 
questions. Have we the very words of the writer, or have 
inaccuracies been introduced, whether deliberately or uncon- 
sciously into the text ? What was the writer's source of 
information, was it good or bad ? Had he any motive for 
concealing facts of one particular type, or for wilfully mis- 
representing those of another ? Did he understand what he 
was writing, or can he have led his readers astray by an 
unconscious falsification of evidence ? By putting to himself 
such questions as these, and by painfully eliciting the answers 
to them from the materials which lie to hand, the historian 
can usually manage to discriminate between conflicting state- 
ments, and to extricate himself from what looks at first sight 
like a hopeless impasse. But the process is lengthy and 
tiresome ; often there is very little to show for all the time 
and trouble expended. On the face of things, it seems so much 
simpler to make up one's mind first of all to rely entirely upon 
one of our major sources, and to pass over in silence any 
conflicting statement. After all, one of the two stories must 
be right, and if the point is not of very much importance, is it 
worth while going through a long and wearisome process of 
analysis, in which mistakes are very likely to occur ? Is it 
not better to make a good guess, and leave it at that ? Such 
are some of the considerations which from time to time present 
themselves to the mind of the historian. But he has to 



66 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

remember that whenever he finds himself unable or unwilling 
to carry through this tedious investigation, and decides in 
simple faith to rely upon one source only, his work loses all 
its value, and the consequence is that the process of evidence- 
weighing, upon which the discovery of the truth depends, is 
postponed until the appearance of somebody more capable or 
more energetic. In other words, the historian who is not pre- 
pared to go through these tiresome and confusing investiga- 
tions whenever necessity demands had better lay down his 
pen — a fact which is hardly realised in some quarters, even at 
the present time. 
The I must now pass on quickly to the last of my three divi- 

presen- s [ ons : the pitfalls which beset the historian when he comes 
tation oj • c . . mi 

conclu- to the point of presenting his conclusions to the public. These 

sions. are the deepest and the most formidable of all, and in them 

many a promising history has been engulfed. Perhaps the 

first difficulty is that of selecting what is essential, and rejecting 

what is non-essential to the course of the narrative. Upon 

the success with which this very difficult process is carried 

through depends the clearness and the readableness of the 

text. The historian must present a narrative, and not a note 

book : failing this, his work, however valuable in itself, will be 

unintelligible. Now this question of selection, which must 

be decided by each historian for himself, is the rock upon which 

many of the boldest discoverers are shipwrecked. They fail 

to see that minute details, however interesting in themselves, 

only serve to confuse and to irritate the reader unless they 

contribute directly to the elucidation of difficulties. And 

. it is unfortunately the case that these minor points are usually 

the most interesting to the enthusiastic historian. Not only 

does he fail to realise that they have no place in the narrative, 

but he is unable to imagine how they can possibly be omitted. 

As a result, his text is overloaded with facts which do not 

contribute towards the justification of his conclusions : it is 

impossible, as the phrase goes, to see the wood for the trees : 

and, in consequence, no one can discover what his main 

conclusions are, or how he arrives at them. 



PITFALLS IN THE PATH OF THE HISTORIAN G7 

In overcoming this difficulty, the historian can do much 
by the judicious employment of the tricks of his trade. The 
proper function of footnotes and appendices is precisely that 
of clearing the text by providing a refuge for details therefrom 
excluded. The reader travels smoothly along the main stream 
of the narrative, while in the numerous backwaters of footnotes 
and digressions he can see something of the difficulties of 
the navigation through which the historian is piloting him so 
shrewdly. The appendix provides a receptacle for much 
that is of antiquarian interest, of a kind which is well worthy 
of presentation in connected form, but which would hope- 
lessly encumber and confuse the progress of the text. The 
footnote is principally used to convey to the reader an indica- 
tion of the precise source of crucial statements, so that he can 
revise, or (if he may) confute, the reasonings of the historian. 
And in this connection it may be mentioned that all references 
should be full and precise, and not after the Teutonic fashion, 
wherein the author is content to cite the authority of books 
without number, giving neither page nor chapter for the 
benefit of the bewildered reader. Let us hope that after the 
war, German savants as well as German soldiers will see reason 
to revise their methods. 

Lastly, comes the question of style, which is the most Style, 
difficult of subjects to treat of in a satisfactory manner. The 
historian differs from the man of letters in that his first aim 
must be lucidity rather than elegance. Generally speaking, 
the simpler the style, the better it is from the point of view 
of historical writing. An elaborate and adorned prose is apt 
to sacrifice accuracy to ornamentation, and to postpone truth 
to a piquant phrase. Picturesque language and vivid writing 
have, of course, their place among the stock-in-trade of the 
historian : indeed, they would seem to be a necessary ac- 
companiment to a sympathetic investigation of the past. 
Generally, however, their part is a modest one. They may 
afford relief to the monotony of a simple and austere narrative, 
but there is little more they can do, except at such times as 
the historian aims at conveying to his readers a detailed 



68 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

impression of the social or political milieu of a particular 
epoch. In this matter, as in many others, Ranke is the master 
of the new school of history. His plain, matter-of-fact style, 
which Heine compared to " boiled mutton with plenty of 
carrots," is admirably fitted to convey his cogent reasoning 
and perspicuous conclusions. One has only to compare him 
with Macaulay to realise the advantages of simplicity over 
elaboration. Ranke deals with great matters plainly and 
intelligibly, giving priceless information in an unassuming 
manner. Macaulay is vague and rhetorical, disguising the 
simplest facts in the cloak of a brilliant and meretricious 
style. The first author illuminates the very heart, the second 
does little more than tinge with prismatic glow the surface, of 
the subject of which he treats. 

With this I must bring my remarks to a close. I fear lest 
some of my audience, before the end of this part of my course 
has been reached, may have accused me, at any rate in their 
own minds, of decking out the merest platitudes in sounding 
phrases. Some of my remarks must indeed have been painfully 
obvious to the trained historian, but as in Aristotle's day, it is 
still the obvious which requires to be pointed out most carefully, 
if it is not to escape our notice. And I will venture to say that 
if some of the precautions with which I have been dealing, but 
which I cannot claim to have invented, were observed more 
strictly by those who write upon things historical, the con- 
dition of scholarship, not merely in India, but also in Europe, 
would be very far removed from what it is to-day. But in 
this matter, as in most others, it is easy to theorise. The real 
difficulty comes when one attempts oneself to put theory 
into practice. And whatever our performance may happen 
to be, it may be some consolation for us to remember that our 
theory, at all events, is irreproachable ! 



LECTURE IV 

Personality in History 



PERSONALITY IN HISTORY 

1. Statement of the Problem. 

2. Conflicting Theories. 

3. Method of Procedure. 

(a) Classical Times. 

(b) The Middle Ages. 

(c) Dawn of New Conditions. 

4. Results. 

{a) Two Inferences. 

(6) Their Application to Indian History. 



LECTUEE IV 

In the three preceding lectures I have tried to give you an 
idea of the aims and methods of historical research as it is 
carried on under modern conditions. It cannot have escaped 
your notice that the investigator of historical problems, 
however skilful he may be, occupies a position differing essen- 
tially from that of the man who occupies himself with the 
phenomena of natural science. The solutions discovered by 
the historian are only true provisionally ; and this for two 
reasons. In the first place, he can never prove to demon- 
stration that the evidence upon which he relies contains all 
the premises necessary for the deduction of a correct con- 
clusion : and in the second place, the very phenomena which 
he investigates are not of universal occurrence. The historical 
events which he is trying to explain have happened only once : 
they will not happen again, however convenient their repeti- 
tion would be for purposes of experiment. It necessarily 
follows, then, that the conclusions of the historian are at 
best only true when taken in connection with the particular 
conditions of time, place, and circumstance upon which they 
are based. They have no universal application, and cannot 
serve as the foundation for any inductive science. This is not 
to condemn modern historians as " unscientific " ; indeed, it 
is upon a frank recognition of the limitations imposed by the 
nature of the materials in which they work, that their best 
claim to be considered men of science really depends. 

The realisation that a statement of cause and effect, the 
truth of which has been demonstrated in relation to particular 
conditions of time, place, and circumstance, having no universal 

71 



72 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

validity, cannot be applied indiscriminately to other conditions 
of time, place, and circumstance, may be considered the founda- 
tion of modern historical method. An admission that a con- 
clusion, once true, is not always true, leads directly to that 
meticulous scrutiny of evidence in each individual instance, 
which is the principal business of the historian of to-day. In 
order that you may realise more clearly the necessity of dis- 
trusting generalisations claiming universal validity, even in 
connection with a question which might seem to invite them, 
I have thought it desirable, in the last lecture of the course, to 
discuss a topic of such character as that indicated by the title. 
The State- Now the particular problem to which I would direct your 
me7 !* attention to-day, and upon the examination of which I propose 
Problem. to s P en( l tne ^ mQ remaining, may be called the problem of 
the personal equation in history. Please do not think that in 
the brief space at my disposal I shall attempt to resolve an 
abstruse question of metaphysic or to improvise a philosophy 
of history. My aim is far more modest. I shall merely put 
before you in a manner which, I fear, is somewhat desultory, 
a few critical reflections upon a topic which must always be of 
interest to students of history, and particularly, for reasons 
with which I hope to deal later, to students of Oriental History. 
The terms of the problem may be stated somewhat as 
follows. What is the relation between the influence of person- 
ality and the influence of such non-personal forces as heredity 
and environment, over the course taken by the world's history ? 
Or, to phrase the question in rough and ready fashion, is it 
truer to say with Carlyle that the Great Man shapes his sur- 
roundings, or with Buckle, that he is shaped by them ? 

I shall direct your attention to the work of these two men, 
not because I consider them in the front rank of historians, 
not even because they are really representative exponents 
each of his particular theory ; but because, by their very 
downrightness and contempt of compromise, they serve to 
bring out, and indeed, to exaggerate, the difference between 
the alternative solutions which have been propounded to the 
problem we are investigating. 



PERSONALITY IN HISTORY 73 

" The History of the World," says Carlyle, " is but the Conflict- 
Biography of Great Men." * On the face of it, this theory ™9 . 
appears to have much to commend it. None can deny that 
the life-work of men such as Cromwell and Bismarck has 
exercised a profound influence upon the events of the time 
in which they lived. Nor is it only through the slow course 
of years that personality must gather its force ere it becomes 
a factor of the first magnitude. In space of a few short hours, 
in the twinkling of an eye, rather, the man of destiny may weave 
a new thread into the everlasting fabric which hangs upon 
Time's loom. If Alexander had been content to yield to the 
entreaties of his soldiers on the banks of the River Beas : if 
Timur had abandoned himself to despair on that terrible night 
by the well of Khorassan, when his fortunes were at their 
lowest ebb, and the three faithless ones among his little fol- 
lowing of ten stole three of his last seven horses and fled : 2 
if Babur's buoyant temper had not again and again borne him 
triumphant over incredible obstacles, to exalt him at last to the 
empire of glorious Hindostan : 3 the history of the world must 
have taken a different turn. Each of us, from his own reading 
of historical literature, can multiply such examples for himself. 

With Buckle, now, the case stands exactly reversed. For 
him, the destinies of mankind are governed by laws as in- 
evitable and as susceptible of demonstration as those which 
obtain in the physical world of nature. Individual efforts 
are insignificant in determining the direction which will be 
taken by the mass of human affairs. Men, even the greatest, 
are but the creatures of the age to which they belong. The 
personal equation, in short, is unworthy of the historian's 
notice ; and the advance in the sum-total of the intellectual 
wealth of the human race, which is the only thing worth 
observing in history, depends, not upon individual effort, but 
upon the influence of climate, soil, food, and natural scenery. 
Let me give an example of the application of this theory to a 

1 Heroes and Hero Worship. 

2 Tuzukat-i-Timuriy ed. Davy and White, p. 37. 
a Memoirs of Babur, passim. 



U THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

particular country, which may serve as a specimen of the 
extremes to which it was carried in the hands of this author. 
In the introduction to his History of Civilisation, Buckle pro- 
fesses to derive all the distinctive characteristics of Indian 
institutions, all the peculiarities of national temper, from the 
alleged fact that the staple food of the nation is rice. It is 
because the principal nutriment of the natives of India is 
oxygenous rather than carbonaceous in character, that it 
follows of necessity, " as the night the day," that caste prevails, 
that rents are high, that custom and law are stereotyped. The 
example is not happy, for indeed, as Sir John Strachey has 
said, 1 the case is parallel to that presented by an imaginary 
Indian traveller, who landing in the West Coast of Ireland and 
finding that the people lived on potatoes, should proceed to the 
assumption that potatoes were the ordinary food of natives 
of Europe, and should base on that single imaginary fact 
elaborate conclusions regarding the condition of society in 
Germany or in Spain. 

It is not, perhaps, so easy to see the justification for this 
theory as it is to realise the strength of the ideas advocated by 
Carlyle ; but it has, I believe, two considerations to commend 
it. There is first the fact that when we are dealing with long 
periods of time, the individual does seem to sink into the mass 
of mankind, so that when we seek to determine the causes of 
great national movements, the " non-personal " factors of 
environment and heredity seem to gain prominence at the 
expense of the personal equation. Secondly, it teaches us, 
even though the lesson be unduly emphasised, that there are 
always other elements, in addition to the personal equation, 
which must be taken into account before we can explain 
satisfactorily the course of events in any particular epoch. 

Now, as you will readily perceive, Carlyle and Buckle stand 
as the poles asunder, the one stating in effect that personality 
is all powerful from the historian's point of view, the other, 
that it is impotent. Between these two extremes are ranged 
the bulk of historians, ancient and modern. 

1 India, Us Administration and Progress, p. 324. 



PERSONALITY IN HISTORY 75 

From the time of Aristotle onwards, thinking men have Method 
realised that the personalities of the principal actors in the of Pro- 
world-drama are not the only influences which go to determine 
the march of events. I believe, however, that a brief examina- 
tion will show that the manner in which the great masters of 
historical method have settled this problem will always be 
found to have been intimately connected not only with the 
particular nature of their work, but also with the circumstances 
under which their work was carried on. 

Let us first of all turn our attention to the conditions which Classical 
obtained during the times of classical antiquity. The cha- times - 
racteristic feature of Mediterranean civilisation during that 
period was the city-state, with its small, intense, highly 
concentrated life. Generally speaking, the numerous minor 
offices of the administration went the round of the full citizens, 
and so many people spent so much of their time in serving the 
state in one capacity or another, that an intelligent under- 
standing of political questions, as well as a working knowledge 
of the details of the administration, were widely diffused among 
the inhabitants. In many cases, questions of policy were 
openly discussed upon their own merits in the public assembly, 
and the personal credit of the proposer of any course of action 
was bound up with the success or failure of his programme. 
Even where the influence of the public assembly was small in 
comparison with that wielded by some individual, whether 
king or tyrant, this individual, whose sphere of action frequently 
lay within the walls of a single city, from the very closeness of 
his contact with those over whom he exercised authority, 
found himself in a very remarkable degree dependent upon 
their good opinion. One result of this condition of affairs is 
seen in the peculiarly personal aspect which political life 
assumed. So intimate was the connection between the public 
and the private capacity of the individual citizen, so close was 
the contact between the man and the state, that the fate of an 
organised political society not infrequently turned upon the 
personal action of a private individual. These conditions, as 
we should expect, are reflected very clearly in the historical 



76 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

writing of the time. Broadly speaking, the historians of 
antiquity, from Thucydides to Polybius, despite striking 
differences in style and method, have this in common : they 
agree in ascribing the very highest importance to the personal 
equation, less because they were blind to the influence exercised 
upon the destiny of a state by the forces of heredity and environ- 
ment, than because their political system was calculated to 
place a premium upon individuality, and to suspend the 
weightiest national issues upon the frail thread of personal 
vagary and caprice. 
The With the break-up of the Roman Empire, and the effective 

Middle entrance upon the scene of the so-called Barbarian nations, 
ges * the world-drama takes a new turn. The individual vanishes 
from sight, swallowed up by the corporation, great or small, 
Christian Church or guild-merchant, as the case might be. 
The history of Western Europe in the middle ages is less the 
history of the relations of individual with individual, than the 
history of the relations of corporation with corporation. 
Tradition, the very life-blood of corporate existence, is all 
powerful in the spheres of politics, of society, or religion. The 
individual is born into a corporation, and his destiny is largely 
governed by the accident of his birth, for in that corporation he 
lives, and in it he dies. Occasionally there arises some man 
of personality stronger than his fellows, passionately protesting 
against the impotence of the individual ; but he finds himself 
doomed to struggle vainly against the overwhelming might of 
the forces which throw themselves into the scale against him. 
And it is perhaps worth noticing that the greatest tragedies 
of mediseval history, such as we associate with the names of 
Abelard, and Frederick, Wonder of the World, are concerned 
with these fruitless protests against the spirit of the age on the 
part of enlightened individuals. Significantly enough, the 
extent of the change which had come over society since classical 
times has to be gathered from the writings of contemporary 
historians mainly by inference. The historian's work, like 
much else in the middle ages, was carried on in accordance 
with a preconceived theory rather than in accordance with the 



PERSONALITY IN HISTORY 77 

demands of existing conditions. Influenced principally by 
imitation of the writers of classical antiquity, the historians 
of the middle ages, under-estimating the power of custom in a 
society literally held together by the bonds of tradition, in 
their determination of the course of events persisted in ascribing 
to personality a weight greater than it actually possessed. 
But with this modification there can be little doubt that in the 
historical writing of the middle ages, the circumstances in 
which a man is placed are regarded as dominating rather than 
directing his activities. That an individual, however eminent, 
could exercise a preponderating influence over the course of 
history, is a conception that hardly found a place in the mind 
of the writers of the time. 

At length the mediseval system was brought to an end by Dawn of 
the joint working of a number of influences, which produced ^ ew ^ on " 
successively the revival of classical learning, the renaissance, 
and the religious reformation. Gradually was the individual 
emancipated from the tyranny of custom, until a vista almost 
limitless in extent opened itself for the development of person- 
ality. As an immediate consequence, there was a remarkable 
reversion to the more ancient regime, which we have seen 
associated with the dominance of the personal factor. From 
sheer reaction against the thraldom to which they had been so 
long subjected, the forces of personality ran riot, finding their 
revenge for centuries of annihilation in the exaggerated 
individuality of such epochs as the Italian humanistic age. 
But by gradual degrees the balance was restored. The 
entrance of the middle classes into politics, the struggle for 
religious and constitutional liberty, combined to moderate at 
last the excessive valuation which had been for the moment 
assigned to the influence of the individual man. From this 
time forward, indeed, it is broadly true to say that wherever an 
historian of eminence fails to take sufficient account of the 
non-personal influences in national development, examination 
will generally reveal the presence of some special circumstances 
which serve to explain the error in his analysis of the causes of 
events. In the case of the English historian Clarendon, for 



78 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

example, there can be little doubt that his marked inclination 
to exaggerate the importance of the personal factor in the 
politico-religious struggle which he describes, springs first from 
his own intimate acquaintance with the leading actors whose 
names were linked with every stage of the tragedy of the 
Great Civil War : and secondly, from the social and religious 
prejudices which prevented him from understanding the extent 
to which the national temper was affected, on the one hand by 
ideals with which he had no sympathy, and on the other, by 
currents of opinion which were wholly independent of the 
personality of this man or of that. Again, to take an example 
of a more recent day. The tendency which some have re- 
marked in Leopold von Ranke, to lay undue stress on the 
influence exercised by the individual man upon some slow, age- 
long process of national development, is probably to be 
explained by the keen delight he himself experienced in the 
handling of the letters, memoirs, and other personal documents, 
of which he made such new and such brilliant use. Absorbed 
as he was in the fortunes of those whose lives he delighted in 
investigating, he was sometimes led to exaggerate the import- 
ance of the part they played in shaping the course of history. 
Very much the same might be said of Carlyle, whose uncom- 
promising views as to the omnipotence of personality have 
already been noticed. Passionately interested in the develop- 
ment of character, caring little for the history of institutions 
save in so far as they bore directly upon the fortunes of the 
individual, he naturally concerned himself with those periods 
when vast social or political conflagrations threw some strong 
personality into relief against a background of stormy light. 
Hence, concentrating himself almost exclusively upon the 
Great Man, he allowed too little influence to the non-personal 
forces which contributed towards Greatness. 

Now :* is probable, I think, that from the occasional failure 
of sucr distinguished historians to allow due weight to the 
non-pejs >nal factors in their analysis of the causes of events, 
sprang, by sheer reaction, the self-styled Scientific school of 
history. Starting from Montesquieu, and drawing a powerful 



PERSONALITY IN HISTORY 79 

impetus from the advances in natural science which marked the 
beginning of the nineteenth century, this school reached its 
logical extreme in the positivist theory of history which Buckle 
borrowed from Comte. That Buckle carried it to unjustifiable 
lengths must be admitted by all ; Lord Acton, in fact, not 
content with slaying it out of hand in his trenchant essay on 
Mr. Buckle's Theory of History, invoked a solemn curse on 
any attempt to resuscitate the corpse. 

Let us now sum up the results of this brief survey. We have Results. 
seen in the first place that the solutions which have been 
propounded to our problem have varied from age to age in 
accordance with the general characteristics of the period. 
Historians writing at a time which favoured the free develop- 
ment of individuality are inclined to consider the personal 
factor as predominant. On the other hand, if conditions are 
such that the individual experiences difficulty in asserting him- 
self against the overwhelming force of convention and custom, 
there is a tendency to minimise the influence of personality 
upon the course of events. Secondly, the manner in which the 
problem is solved varies from historian to historian, according 
as his inclination, or the nature of his work, or the influence 
of other writers, sways the balance to one side or the other. 

From these results we shall be justified, I think, in drawing Two In- 
two inferences. The first and most important is this. The ferences - 
question of the relative influence of the personal and non- 
personal factors in determining the course of history, like other 
problems falling within the province of the historian, does not 
admit of an absolute answer. It is possible to find a provisional 
solution which shall be true for certain fixed conditions of time, 
place, and circumstances, but the truth of that solution will 
depend upon the prevalence of these conditions, and will have 
no general application. To ask a historian whether the man 
shapes the age or the age the man, is like asking him what is 
the best form of government. He can only reply, " It all 
depends." In neither case can the questions be answered by 
any process of a priori reasoning, apart from the data afforded 
by particular circumstances. 



80 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

And the second inference is this. The estimate which 
even the greatest historians have formed as to the relative 
importance of the personal and the non-personal factors is by- 
no means unimpeachable, even within the limits of a particular 
epoch. There is great need of careful inquiry, so that bias, 
whether derived from the personality of the writer, from the 
characteristic features of the period with which he deals, or 
from circumstances amidst which he wrote, may be detected 
and discounted. And I venture to think that both these 
inferences are of particular value to us as students of Indian 
history. 
Their In the first place, by way of general caution, be it observed 

tiorftcT" tnat we must ^ e careful not to assume that principles of politics 
Indian or of government which are true with reference to Western 
History. Europe will have any validity when applied to Oriental con- 
ditions. Because the history of England, France, and Germany 
has hitherto proceeded along certain well marked lines, we are 
not justified in concluding that these lines either have governed 
in the past or will govern in the future the development of 
India. The circumstances of the East are not those of the 
West ; and a recognition of this fact is the first step towards a 
just appreciation of the special character of the problems of 
Indian history. In the second place, with reference to the 
particular problem under discussion, we must beware of 
imagining that any hard and fast rule can be laid down as to 
the influence exerted by the personal and non-personal factors 
in determining the course of the history of India. This 
caution is the more necessary because there are two powerful 
characteristic features of the Oriental polity which, especially 
to the investigator whose historical teaching has been conducted 
along Western lines, suggest that the personal factors are 
always supreme. The first is the relatively simple structure 
of the Oriental despotic state, which, in the absence of formal 
constitutional restraints upon the sovereign, contrasts so 
strongly with the politics of Western Europe. Everything, 
at first sight, would seem to depend upon the caprice of the 
handful of men who direct the administration. But before 



PERSONALITY IN HISTORY 81 

long it is realised the force of religious tradition, the fear of 
revolution, and the menace of palace intrigue, represent 
sanctions as definite and as formidable as anything which 
Western society can suggest. The second is the typically 
Oriental notion of the inherent sanctity of authority. 1 Political 
authority, being the gift of God, confers upon its possessor, at 
least in theory, an unquestioned control over the life and 
fortune of the individual citizen. With such a spectacle before 
us, it is easy to forget the gulf which divides the classes inter- 
ested in politics from those over whose unmoved and uncom- 
prehending heads pass the greatest political changes, without 
any visible effect. So great is this gulf that, as we know, it 
taxes the remarkable combination of furious energy and wrong- 
headed ingenuity which distinguishes a Muhammad binTughlak, 
to exert any real influence upon both classes alike. The kind 
of ruler whom Sa'adi describes, just because he controls his 
immediate associates so entirely, can have little energy to 
spare, comparatively speaking, for the purpose of exercising an 
effective influence upon the destinies of the mass of his people. 

The last lesson which can be learnt from our examination 
of the problem of personality in history is this. The material 
with which the student of Indian history is called upon to deal, 
largely consisting as it does of official correspondence, memoirs, 
and the lucubrations of court historians, is precisely of a 
character to lend undue emphasis to the influence of the 
personal equation in politics. It is for this reason that we need 
to be specially on our guard against two dangers. The first is 
that the court historian, whose object was to extol the omnipo- 
tence of his patrons, generally ascribes to them an excessive 
influence over the history of their times. The second is that 
we ourselves, by lengthy examination of materials presenting 
a partial and one-sided view of the question, may be influenced 
unduly by the opinions expressed by our authorities. 

With these words I must bring my last lecture to a close. 
I have tried to show you briefly an example of the application 

1 Cf. the remarks of Abu'l Fazl in his Introduction to the AyeenAkberi, 
ed. tit., p. ix. 



82 THE HANDLING OF HISTORICAL MATERIAL 

of critical methods to some of the solutions which have been 
propounded for a particular problem of history. My examina- 
tion of the historical significance of the personal equation has 
at least revealed the necessity of scrutinising with the most 
meticulous care the nature of the materials upon which we have 
to work. Slot content with discovering and allowing for the 
bias in our author which springs from his personal predilections, 
or which is induced by some particular characteristic of the 
period which he studies ; we must in addition strive to eliminate 
that much more elusive thing, the bias which, all uncon- 
sciously so far as he is concerned, creeps into his work through 
the influence of the very atmosphere — social, political or 
religious — amidst which his work was carried on. 



NOMINAL INDEX 



[Square brackets enclose the Author's name.] 



A. 



Abbot, E. (author), 45 

Abdu-r-Razzak, 42 

Abelard, Pierre, 76 

Abu'1-Fazl Al-Baihaki (author), 42, 
43,48 

Abu'1-Fazl Allaini (author), 40, 81 

Acton, Lord (author), 79 

Agrarian Problem in the X VI. Cen- 
tury [R. H. Tawnay], 34 

Ain Ahbari (Ayeen AJcberi) 
[Abu'1-Fazl Allami], 24, 35, 81 

Akbar, the Emperor, 11, 41 

Alfred, King of England, 3 

Ananda Ranga Pillai (author), 38 

Ancient Law [Sir H. S. Maine], 60 

Archaeology, 11, 12 

Architecture, 11 

Aristotle (author), 68, 75 

Aurangzib, the Emperor, 26, 41 

Austro-Hungarian Empire, 25 



B. 



Babur, the Emperor, 43, 73 
Badaoni, Abdu-1-Qadir (author), 58 
Bahlol Lodi, Sultan of Delhi, 43 
Beas, River, 73 
Behar, 38 

Bernier, Francois (traveller), 46 
Beveridge, Mrs. (editor), 38 
Bismarck, Prince Von, 47, 73 
" Black Hole," 22 
Borgia, Cesare, 3, 23 
British Museum, 11, 17 
Brown, Horatio (author), 25 
Buckle, William (author), 4, 72, 73, 
74,79 



Bu'l Ala, 42 

Bu'l Hasan, 42 

Bu Nairn, 42 

Busch, Wilhelm (author), 48 



C. 



Calendar of Letters and Papers, 
Foreign and Domestic, of the 
reign of Henry VIII. [Brewer, 
etc.], 22 

Calendar of State Papers preserved 
in the Venetian Archives [Brown], 
25 

Cambridge, 4 

Carlyle (author), 72, 73, 74, 78 

Charles L, King of England, 21 

Chaucer (author), 20, 33 

Cicero (author), 44, 49 

Clarendon, Earl of (author), 48, 70 

Clive, Robert, 3, 21 

Codex Diplomaticus JEJvi Saxonici 
[Kemble], 18 

Comte, Auguste (author), 4, 79 

Cotton MSS., British Museum, 17 

Cromwell, 0., 73- 



D, 



Dailainan, near Ghazni, 42 
Daud Maimandi, 42 
Davenport, Francis (author), 34 
Davy (author), 24, 73 
Delbriick (author), 56 
Diplomatics, 17 

Documents of the Puritan Revolu- 
tion [S. R. Gardiner], 21 
Dowson, John (author), 42 
83 g 2 



84 



NOMINAL INDEX 



E. 



Earle, John (author), 16 

East India Company, 23, 26, 33 

Economic Development of a Norfolk 

Manor [Davenport], 34 
Edward III., King of England, 54 
Elliot, Sir H. M. (author), 42 
English Historical Review , 19 
Epigraphy, 10 
Erasmus (author), 49 
Exchequer, Court of, 2 



F. 



Faulad Birlas, Mirza, 59 

Ferrero (author), 56 

Firishta, Muhammad bin Kasim 

(author), 40 
Firozi Garden (near Ghazni), 42 
Froissart (author), 55, 56 



G, 



Gardiner, S. R. (author), 21 

Oedanken u. Erinnerungen [Bis- 
marck], 47 

Geoffrey de Mandeville [J. H. 
Round], 19 

German savants, 67 

German soldiers, 67 

Glencoe, Massacre of, 22 

Goldsmith, Oliver (author), 2 

Gooch, G. P. (author), 1 

" Great Mogul," 46 

Greeks, 59 

Gulbadan Begam, 38, 43 



H. 

Hastings, Warren, 3, 61 

Hawkins, W (traveller), 46 

Heine (author), 68 

Henry I., King of England, 27 

Herodotus (author), 46 

Heroes and Hero Worship [Carlyle], 

73 
Hieuen Tsang (traveller), 44 
Hindal Mirza, 38 



I Hindustan, 11, 43, 73 
Histoire de Timur Bee [Petis de la 

Croix], 24 
History of British India [Mill], 61 
History of Civilisation [Buckle], 74 
History of the Draper's Company 

[Johnson], 33 
History of the Great Rebellion [Gar- 
diner], 48 
History of India [Elliot and Dow- 
son], 42 
History of the Papacy [Pastor], 23 
Humayun Nama [Gulbadan Be- 
gam], 38, 43 



I. 



Ibrahim Lodi, Sultan of Delhi, 43 
ibn Batuta (traveller), 45 
Iliad, 59 

India, its Administration and Pro- 
gress [Strachey], 74 
Irvine, William (author), 26, 35 



Jagadis Mukhopadhyaya, 24, 35 
Jahangir, the Emperor. 11 
Johnson, Rev. A. H. (author), 33 



Kasim Ali Khan, 21 
Kemble (author), 18 
Khalifs, 59 
Khaiil Daud, 42 
Khorassan, 73 
Khufia nawis, 24 



L. 

La Bourdonnais, 38 

Lactantius (author), 44 

Lahore, 59 

Lane Poole, S. (author), 11 

London, 10, 33 

Luard (editor), 17 



NOMINAL INDEX 



85 



M. 



Macaulay, Lord (author), 68 

Madox {author), 2 

Mahmud Batshikan, Sultan of 

Ghazni, 3, 58 
Maine, Sir H. S. {author), 60 
Mafauz Khan, 38 
Manucci (author), 41, 46 
Marco Polo (traveller), 45 
McCrindle (author), 10 
Memoirs of Babur [Babur], 73 
Memphis, 46 

Mill, James (author), 61, 62 
Minoan Civilisation, 12 
Montesquieu, 78 
Mughal Emperors, 26, 35, 41 
Muhammad bin Tughlak, Sultan 

of Delhi, 81 
Mulla Ahmad, 58, 59 



N. 



Napoleon I., 10 
Norman Conquest, 18 
Numismatics, 10 



O. 

Oaten, E. F. (author), 46 
Oriental Translation Fund, 38 
Oudh Begams, 61 



P. 

Paris, Matthew (author), 17 
Paston Family, 49 
Patna, 21 
Patria potestas, 60 
Pastor, Ludwig (author), 23 
Pepys, Samuel (author), 48 
Petis de la Croix (author), 24 
Polybius (author), 76 
Pondicherry, 38 
Powis, Earl of, 21 
Prcemunientes clause, 16 
Public Record Office, 49 
Punjab Museum, 11 



Queen's University, Canada, 39 



R. 



Ranke, Leopold von (author), 68, 

78 
Recollections of Bismarck [Busch], 

48 
Report of Royal Commission on 

Historical MSS. in private hands, 

26 
Report of Royal Commission on 

Public Records, 26 
Retz, Cardinal de, 47 
Roe, Sir Thomas (traveller), 46 
Rohilla War, 61 
Roman Empire, 76 
Rome, 3 
Round, J. H. (author), 19 



Sa'adi (author), 81 

St. Alban in Legend and History 

[Rushbrook Williams], 38 
St. Alban's Abbey, 17 
St. Bartholomew's day, 22 
St. Thomas of Canterbury, 45 
Sarkar, Prof. Jadunath, 26 
" Scientific Age," 2 
Seeley, Sir John (author), 4. 
Select Charters [Stubbs], 17, 27 
Shakespeare, William (author), 20, 

32,33 
Sharafu-d-din 'Ali Yazdi (author), 

24 
Shir Shah, Sultan of Hindustan, 

38 
Sikandar Lodi, Sultan of Delhi, 

43 
Siya biruz, 42 

Smith, Mr. Vincent (author), 10 
Spencer, Herbert (author), 4 
Stevenson, R. L. (author), 55, 62 
Storia do Mogor [Manucci], 26, 35, 

41,46 
Strachey, Sir J. (author), 62, 74 
Stubbs, Bishop (author), 17, 27 



8G 



NOMINAL INDEX 



T. 



Tarikh-i-Alfi [Mulla Ahmad], 58 
Tawnay, R. H. {author), 34 
Tell, William, 3 
Thucydides (author), 76 
Timur the Lame, 11, 24, 73 
Trojans, 59 
Tudor History, 25 
Tuzukat-i-Timuri, 24, 73 



V. 



Vatican Library, 23, 56 
Venetian Agents, 24 
Venetian Archives, 24 
Vinogradov, Prof. Paul (author). 20 



W. 



Waqia 'Nawis, 24 
White, J. (author), 24, 73 
Whitehead, Mr. R. B. (author), 11 
William II. of England, 27 
William the Chamberlain [Rush- 
brook Williams], 19 



Y. 



Year Books, 20 



Zafar Nama [Sharafu-d-Din 'Ali 
Yazdi], 24 



THE END 



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